god of ashes
by hiyoris-scarf
Summary: in which Iki Hiyori and the Yatogami encounter each other hundreds of years ago rather than yesterday; in which he is known only as the magatsukami; in which she cannot seem to shake the certainty that she was always meant to meet him.
1. one

**there may be very vague manga spoilers in this fic, but if you haven't read Noragami you should still be fine *thumbs up emoji***

* * *

It takes less than ten seconds.

The harsh clatter of the cart's wheels over the uneven road ends in a jaw-shattering jolt. The silence of the exhausted travelers escalates into a chorus of distress and anguish. The colorless, fog-shrouded road explodes in a spectacle of red. The attackers strike with blinding speed and force, their convergence around the humble caravan like a snake coiling around a mouse.

The last thing she sees is her mother's terrified face, before she is shoved into the corner of the uncovered cart and nearly smothered with a heavy, damp sack. She feels instantly crushed, and tries to push it off.

"Shh, Hiyori," her mother urges.

She has to nearly shout in Hiyori's ear over the clamor outside, and her voice is caught on the sharp edge of fright. But underneath the fright, there is a calmness that is somehow much worse.

"Don't breathe the smoke—don't breathe at all. Don't move."

Her mother's words rasp against her ear outside the damp sack. Hiyori's short legs cramp at once, but she tries to obey. She hears muffled chaos through its thickness, and her father's voice. His voice is the loudest. The other members of their small caravan are out there too, Hiyori hears them. And she hears other voices.

Male voices. Cold. Just like the endless fog.

"Hiyori, you hear me?! Don't move," her mother begs, pushing her head down toward the floor of the cart and shoving her farther into the corner. Something heavy rolls in front of the sack, replacing the weight of her mother's body.

Then she's gone. Hiyori hears her father's voice again, high with distress.

"—Sayuri—!"

A slice of metal through fog, and a few sickening thumps. A few minutes later, there's the sound of boiling, bubbling flesh. Hiyori smells it through the thickness of damp cloth. Her insides ball up, squirming horribly right below her throat.

She doesn't hear her parents' voices anymore. It's silent, except for the bubbling, except for the loud stench that creeps through the weave of the cloth. She smells the burning.

Her head spins and she loses herself in darkness.

/

The first thing she hears, out of that darkness, is the cold, male voices talking just on the other side of the cart's low wall. She has a wild urge to call out for her parents, but her voice won't work.

Besides, her mother told her not to move, to be very silent and still.

Outside, one of the men slams his palm against the side of the cart, and Hiyori jumps. Her feet collide with the rolling object her mother shoved against her, and it careens across the cart floor. Something—it sounds like heavy pottery—shatters a few feet from her.

There is abrupt, listening silence outside.

Hiyori curls up under the heavy cloth, her muscles screaming.

There are quick footsteps, and the cart rocks on its wheels as someone puts weight on it. Curled up on the floor, Hiyori shivers uncontrollably as a hand rips the damp cloth off of her, exposing her brightness-blinded eyes to the mist.

"What's this? A little sweet for dessert!"

The voice belongs to a man, but it's not one of the cold voices. His voice is warm, friendly.

And, like the terrible calmness in her mother's voice, this seems to her more wrong than anything.

He crouches down, no longer casting a towering shadow over her. One of his hands reaches toward her face, pressed against the rough floor of the cart.

"You _are_ just that—a little sweet. Aren't you?"

His fingernails are long, and yellow. The index finger of his right hand curves across her cheek like the talon of a hawk, and Hiyori presses her eyes shut, turning her face away. Splinters dig cruelly into her cheek, and the man laughs kindly.

"Sweet…but silly."

Another voice breaks in; now that she's uncovered Hiyori can hear the men outside the cart clearly.

"Nobu, we have to leave. Just get rid of the little girl."

The man addressed as "Nobu" takes Hiyori's chin between two of his taloned fingers, forcing her to bring her eyes up to his. Her stinging cheek leaves the floor of the cart. He stares into her eyes, and Hiyori stares back, into a face that seems more skull than flesh.

The eye sockets are sunken, starving, with irises the color of coagulated blood. She can't look away from them, but she notices the skin on his face is pitted with deep scars and scabbed over. The leprous, diseased appearance doesn't match that wine-smooth voice.

"We don't have to get rid of her _right_ away," he replies softly, never taking his fingers off Hiyori's chin. His other taloned index finger loops around a few strands of her hair.

She is utterly frozen as he leans in, smelling like fire and rot and overwhelming, clinging mist. He sniffs her, and a barely perceptible shudder passes through his body.

Then, he suddenly lets go of her with both hands, and turns to the men outside the cart.

"Just look at her," he says cheerfully. "Someone in the city would pay quite a lot for this one. Don't you think so, Koizumi?"

"We don't have the time or luxury to bring a child along with us. Get it over with, Nobu, or _I'll_ do it."

Nobu pauses, his body going very still.

"Hmm."

Such a gentle noise, from a mouth that could drip venom.

"It sounds like you've forgotten who led you here, Koizumi. It sounds like you've forgotten that you still are in debt to me."

Tense silence extends, and there's uncomfortable shifting outside the cart. Mutters, from several mouths.

"I—well, I just—" Koizumi begins.

"Come now, don't stutter like a baby."

Nobu is back to cheeriness.

"This one hasn't even seen ten summers and she's putting on a braver face than you are."

His long, long fingernail glides over Hiyori's ear, and something pungent crawls to the top of her throat. Nobu's head swivels back down to look at her, his gray teeth bared in a smile.

"Little sweet, don't be afraid. If you are as sweet as you look, you can come with me. Nobu will protect you."

His fingernail stops stroking her ear; he reaches farther to cup her cheek with his smooth, moist palm. Hiyori flinches away, and before she remembers moving, she smacks his large hand away from her face. The harsh _crack_ is quickly swallowed by the mist.

Nobu's smile stays frozen in shock for a half-second, and then it disappears completely.

"Oh, that won't do," he says. It's low enough to reach only her ears.

Koizumi's agitated voice interrupts.

"Very well—do whatever you like. But it has to be done fast. We need to leave."

"I knew you'd listen, Koizumi."

Nobu bends toward her, and Hiyori scrambles back from him, as far as the walls of the cart will let her.

"Be still," he says, very quiet. And as soon as he says it she is still, like his calm, pleasant voice is a chain around her very bones.

She is perfectly still. Her eyelids won't blink. Her ribs won't expand for breath. Those two words have turned Hiyori's own body into a weapon against her. Nobu watches her as she stares back at him, horrified, motionless. Her blood begins to scream for oxygen, and her wide-open eyes burn, burn, in the mist and smoke.

He stares for a few more seconds, blood-colored eyes locked on her burning ones, and then he says:

"All right. That's enough."

The first breath is a sobbing, heavenly gasp, and Nobu watches in satisfaction as she collapses, boneless with relief, against the cart's back wall.

"You'll come along without fighting, little sweet."

And she has to. Nobu tells her to get up, and she does. One of the men outside the cart reaches up to grab her and lift her down, muttering curses as he does so. In the middle of the road, six other carts are lopsided and ransacked, their gutted contents soaking up the mist and the blood. A little ways off the wide road, there's a tall, black stack of something that lets off foul, hanging smoke. The reek coming off it is rancid with gas and bubbling fat.

The man named Koizumi looks at her in discontent.

"She'd better be worth it, Nobu."

"She will," he replies, contentedly.

Out of the mist, there's a sound. Laughter. A child's delighted giggle.

"What is that?" Koizumi asks, his head whipping around. The other men turn to look in the same direction.

Nobu doesn't look where they look. He grips Hiyori's upper arm and nearly yanks it out of its socket as he drags her around to the other side of the cart—the far side, away from the sourceless, eerie laughter.

"Shit," he mutters.

There's a hiss of wet steel, and the thump of a body dropping.

"Show yourself!" cries Koizumi's voice.

Nobu stands up, releasing his cruel grip on Hiyori's arm. As he stands, he sniffs the smoky, mist-heavy air, and his expression transforms into nightmarish rage. His already ghoulish face loses every ounce of its remaining humanity. He spits:

" _Fuck_ that magatsukami."

There's a sound like rushing water—the girl's clear, chilling laughter—and the drop of another armor-weighted body to the ground. Koizumi's voice rises in panic as he tells his men to fan out.

"Nobu—get back here!"

Nobu crouches again behind the cart, hissing a string of curses through his teeth as another of the men drops with a last loud, gurgling breath. He pushes Hiyori roughly under the cart, behind its heavy, broken front wheel, where nothing but her feet are visible from the outside.

"I think we might have to say goodbye after all, little sweet," he says, with a trace of real regret.

His talons reach for her again, and Hiyori suddenly remembers how moist his palm was—like a tongue. She presses herself flush against the inside of the wheel and fights to remain still. Acid burns the back of her tongue.

But he doesn't touch her. She opens her eyes, peering around the edge of the wheel, and there is nothing but empty mist-drenched roadside, and wafting smoke. The copper scent of blood mixes with the cacophony of other smells.

The next moment, she realizes the clang of metal has vanished, leaving silence.

Hiyori waits, crouched behind the wheel of the destroyed cart, and she feels the silent presence of another person outside. The air weighs down heavier on her with every second.

She opens her mouth to speak, and at first, nothing comes out. Then, she manages to push out a sound.

She means to ask "who's there?" but the shapes of the syllables vanish, and it comes out as a high-pitched whimper.

A single set of footsteps approaches the cart, so light she can barely hear them. They stop a few feet from the far wheel.

Hiyori can't stand it. She flings herself from behind the wheel and tries to dart off the road. Her feet, numb from cold and shock, feel like they've vanished from under her, and she hits the ground at once, landing wrong on one arm. One of her fingers gives a sickening _pop_. The immediate pain of it rips her insides open; she heaves forward, emptying the contents of her stomach right there on the cold ground.

The soft footsteps approach around the side of the cart, and Hiyori clutches her roiling stomach, rocking back on her heels to try and stand again. It doesn't work, and she falls forward onto her elbows, over the pool of sick.

"Eugh. Disgusting."

The laughter is gone from the river-cold, female voice. Hiyori waits for her insides to stop convulsing, and doesn't look up.

"I didn't know there was anyone left alive," says another voice. This one is lower, male.

Two voices. Even though there had been just one set of footsteps.

"There doesn't have to be. We could leave this place all clean."

After her eyes stop swimming, Hiyori sees her elbows planted on the road. She follows them to her hands, one broken finger angled crookedly and throbbing.

She looks at the two sets of bare feet, while the voices they belong to talk high above her.

She looks up.

The first one she sees is the girl.

She looks like she could be a few years older than Hiyori herself. Certainly no older than twelve. Her white yukata is spotless, and so is the white headpiece banded around her hair. Her skin is littered with markings: many, many names inscribed on her flesh. They dance on her ankles, below the hem of the yukata and above its collar. Her face is round, its porcelain perfection accented with a small nose and rosy, puckered lips. Right now, her nose is turned up in disdain from the puddle Hiyori still crouches over.

Hiyori looks into her eyes, and a chill shivers down her spine. The girl's eyes are like open graves.

"We could," the male voice agrees, and her gaze snaps to its owner.

/

 _Magatsukami._

When she is little more than a toddler, Hiyori begs her father to tell her about them: the wild gods who kill for sport.

"They are terrible creatures," her father tells her, his voice growling in mock aggression. He tickles her toes.

"They answer the worst wishes people have, and they love death above all else. You can see it in their eyes—how much they enjoy causing suffering."

"Have _you_ ever seen a magatsukami?" Hiyori asks him, squirming in his lap.

"No, and I don't want to," he says. "They are gods who bring only blood, war, and suffering."

"So a magatsukami is causing all the bad things to happen around our town?" Hiyori asks, innocently.

Her father's face crumples. Hiyori's child eyes have not missed the unrest settling over the town like a fog. Soon, it will drive her family from their home, with death on their heels.

"No, Hiyori. Those are only men."

Then, her mother comes into the room, scolding him for scaring their small daughter with his stories. But Hiyori hadn't really been scared.

Not then.

/

Not now.

In all honesty, the person who towers above her is just a man. He looks about her brother's age—probably a little older.

In the time that she stares up at him, Hiyori can't imagine such a face ever aging. He keeps looking down at her, just like the girl does.

 _You can see it in their eyes._

She can. No human could have such eyes.

Looking up at him makes her dizzy, so her gaze moves back down to his feet. Behind him she sees the imprint of bloody, shallow footprints.

"My parents…" she says, weakly.

The girl giggles again.

"How cute! She thinks they might still be alive."

"Hiiro," he reprimands, softly. The girl called Hiiro puffs her lower lip outward in a pout.

Hiyori's vacant stomach gives an unexpected heave, but there's nothing left in her to expel.

"You killed them, didn't you?" she asks. "Those—those men."

She looks back up at him, into eyes that are the bluest part of a flame. He nods once. She scoots away from the puddle of vomit and sits back on her heels.

"Then…I owe you my life!"

The last word breaks on a sob. Hiyori clutches her mud-soaked clothes tight around her shoulders, ignoring the pain in her finger. She leans forward, nearly touching her cold forehead to the ground. Words spill out, leaving every last part of her hollow.

"You came when he was—when they were going to take me…I don't know, I don't know where they were going to take me, I don't know what they would have done to me…especially—especially—"

A shuddering wheeze rasps out of her as Nobu's predatory leer extends behind her eyelids. He had his talons in her hair, on her skin, and suddenly she wants to rip out every strand, scrub off the parts of herself that touched him.

"Th-thank you—thank you—thank you…"

Her spine aches, and her broken finger throbs, but Hiyori doesn't look up.

It's a full minute before the man speaks to her. His voice is still soft, and now slightly curious.

"Should you really be so grateful to me for taking lives?"

Her breath catches in her lungs, and comes out again in a desperate whoosh. Hiyori belatedly realizes that she's severely hyperventilating. Her teeth are chattering hard enough to make speaking difficult.

"Th-they took more lives than you. Th-they k-killed everyone. Everyone except m-m-me…"

Her spasmodic inhales aren't enough to allow for crying and speaking at the same time. She swallows the tears back, whispering:

"Even my p-parents."

With tremendous effort, she calms her breath. She flattens herself before him, her elbows digging into the freezing ground.

"Yes, I am grateful to you, magatsukami-sama."

His posture tenses; stones shift underneath his heels. She raises her gaze slightly, up to his pale, red-smeared ankles.

"Yatogami," he says, almost angrily. Next to him, the girl stiffens.

"Not magatsukami."

Hiyori leans forward again. Her forehead presses right against the road.

"I am grateful to you, Yatogami-sama."

/

She wakes up on a soft surface. Her broken finger screams for attention. Every muscle in her body feels like it's been prodded with hot needles. At first, Hiyori doesn't know anything except her physical pain.

She groans, and footsteps approach her.

"She's waking up," says an unfamiliar voice.

Then, she hears:

"She is?! Hiyori…!"

Her grandmother? Why is she with her grandmother? Her grandmother lives a hundred hours away; it would have taken days to travel…

Her eyes snap open, but for a few seconds she's blind to the room and the faces in it. Her body's agony collapses under the grief barreling down on her. An awful noise grinds through her teeth: something animal, ribbed with pain.

"Hiyori, calm down," her grandmother soothes.

But how can she calm down? How? Those men took her parents; they killed them and burned them on the roadside. They were going to take her with them.

Hiyori closes her eyes again and sees a row of gray teeth, bloodshot eyes, an invisible talon that scrapes the side of her neck. She realizes with sinking despair that the man Nobu was not among the dead.

"I know, I know," her grandmother talks to her, gently.

Hiyori remembers more: her mother's voice—terribly afraid, terribly calm—and the pile of burnt, smoking corpses, and the bodies of the slaughtered raiders, and the overturned carts. She remembers…arriving in the town, carried on the back of a stranger's wagon. She recalls her brother and grandmother coming outside to welcome the rest of their family, and instead seeing just her nine-year-old, broken, mud-spattered body. She remembers having a hard time breathing, and feeling very cold, and a man with a soothing voice had poured something into her mouth and told her not to think too much.

She remembers nothing more than that.

"She's awake?"

Masaomi shoves the thin door aside, letting in light and chatter from without the room.

"Yes," the unfamiliar voice says. It's the same soothing voice that she heard the night before—or maybe it was the night before that, or perhaps several even before. Hiyori does not trust her perception of time at the moment.

"She will need quiet and rest, but her external injuries aren't severe."

"Thank you," her grandmother says sincerely, and walks with the doctor to the doorway as he prepares to leave. He tells her a few more things in a low tone, but Hiyori doesn't listen. Her brother kneels next to her, and begins asking her questions in a gentle voice.

Meanwhile, something other than the horrors in her memory begins to bother her.

 _Who saved her?_

The men were going to take her. They were speaking of selling her—making money off her. But before they could pack her up and abandon the scene of the carnage, someone else had arrived.

Who had saved her? Was it…was it really just one person?

Hiyori shakes her head and closes her eyes, ignoring her brother. She tries to recreate the event—every hideous detail of it—because not knowing is worse than reliving. There were at least fifteen who set upon them, all armed and mounted. It would have been impossible for just one person to kill that many, unless he was immensely skilled. Unless he was—

Her eyelids fly open again. The magatsukami—the Yatogami—and his companion with the cruel, angelic laughter. Everything about him comes back in a rush: everything, from his bare feet, to his blood-drenched yukata, to his terribly, achingly divine face. How could she have already forgotten?

"Hiyori!"

Her brother's voice demands she return to herself. She stops grasping at the memories that slip away like fish under a fast stream.

"Who were the raiders?"

She shakes her head.

"I don't know."

"Were they just a band of plain thieves? Did they have a lord—a commander?"

His voice rises in desperation; it says, _give me an answer, give me something—why did they kill our parents?_

"I don't know…"

Her brother's mouth tightens, and his thin shoulders hunch over.

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. You had to see it all, Hiyori, and I'm…so sorry…"

His voice shakes, and she sits up on the low bed to reach over to him. Offering him comfort gives her something to do; it helps her.

"Those men are dead now," she says, hearing her own voice speak it so blandly.

"They were killed after they butchered the caravan."

Masaomi stops shaking. He sniffs once, looking up.

"What…? I didn't hear that."

He clears his throat, swiping a sleeve across his eyes. He continues:

"The man who drove you into town said he didn't see what had happened. All he said was that he had nearly driven his wagon into a stranger in dark clothing, who was carrying you along the side of the road. The stranger offered to pay him well to make sure you arrived here safely. After you were dropped off last night, an armed group left town a few hours later to see what could be salvaged from the wreck. Maybe, if the attackers' bodies are still there, they'll have some identification…"

Back when he first started speaking, Hiyori's spine had gone ramrod straight. The rest passes emptily through her ears.

"A stranger in dark clothing, you said?"

"Yes—?"

"Did you hear anything more about who it was? About their appearance?"

Masaomi's eyebrows pull together.

"All he said was that at first, he was all alone on the road, and then a second later a strange man stepped in front of his wagon, handed you and the money over to him, and left in less than a minute. He didn't even give a name."

Hiyori stares down at her hands.

He carried her, the Yatogami. He found help for her, and she can't even remember the way his face looked, or the timbre of his voice. She doesn't remember what she told him. She must at least have told him the town where her brother and grandmother live.

Either she told him that, or he somehow knew.

Masaomi sits cross-legged beside her, and starts wondering aloud whether the men who attacked were vassals of a nearby landowner, and if so, what it means for them to be roaming, reaving. Hiyori doesn't care who the men were. She only cares that they are dead.

All except for one, with sunken, blood-colored eyes. _Little sweet._

Her breath shudders. Good thing her stomach is still mostly empty.

Masaomi's voice cuts into her thoughts again.

"Hiyori, did you see who did it? Who killed all of them?"

A nameless god. A wild god. A god of ashes, with eyes like the bluest part of a flame.

"I don't know," she says.

It is not a lie.

 _~ ~ ~ eight years later ~ ~ ~_

"Hiyori-chan, if you come to the market with us, you might at last find a stall that sells husbands."

Hiyori smiles, and keeps her eyes turned toward the rice she's mixing.

"I'm sorry, but that's not really a convincing argument. You're in more of a rush to get me married than you are to fend for yourself, Yama-chan."

Yamashita glowers at her from the doorway, then tosses her hair in mock offense.

"I'm only being a good friend. You're making it so I have to work hard enough for the both of us."

"And what about me?" Ami asks from the storage room, before she comes back out to help Hiyori.

"You're hopeless. It would be no use for me to even try."

Before Ami can hurl an insult back, Hiyori bursts into laughter, and the two look at her in surprise.

"Why don't you both just go buy what you need and have a good time? I'll finish this up."

"Are you sure?" Yama asks her. "It's only a few hours before the biggest shrines will be packed with people."

"I have it handled," Hiyori assures her, jauntily waving a rice-covered hand.

"Well…all right," Yama concedes. "But on your head be it if you are still unmarried by next New Year!"

Ami wipes her hands clean and follows the other girl out the door, leaving Hiyori alone with the food.

The New Year has been her favorite time for as long as she can remember. It means renewal. It's the starting position of a familiar dance. It reminds her of what she should forget, and what she should always, always, remember.

Forget the faces of the men who took her parents from her. Remember the boy who saved her. And now she knows: he must have been just a human boy—one with extraordinary, alien eyes, a delusion of godhood, and an unbelievable talent for murder. Despite his strangeness, she is certain that if magatsukami were to exist, they would not look like him.

During the days of her recovery, after she was saved from the smoking debris of the caravan, Hiyori began to find it very difficult to remember a few key details of the event. Her grandmother chalked it up to trauma, but it was more than that. Patches were vanishing out of her mind, leaving blankness where there should be color, silence where there should be sound.

And, out of it all, Hiyori remembers the worst parts the most clearly. The taste of the air is still seared, stickily, to the inside of her throat. Despite her resolve, she remembers the men's faces, Nobu's especially. In short, wretched nights, she's visited by his gray teeth, his thick talons, his eyes surrounded by pitted flesh.

But her rescuer. She holds with everything in her to the slippery image of him, clinging the most desperately to the odd name he insisted she use for him.

So today, like she has for the last eight years, she repeats it under her breath. The syllables are round, real, concrete. Repeating a name, even a false one, is her best thanks.

 _Yatogami. I remember you._

/

The town is always beautiful during New Year's. It might be the glow of lanterns, or the waft of fresh food, or the intricate garments that people have worked their fingers to the bone for. It might be the casting off of worries, or the thousand hopeful prayers rising at every shrine. It might be all of these things, and whatever it is, Hiyori is glad of it.

After she hands off the load of food to a grumbling Masaomi ("What took you so long, I'm starving?!") Hiyori finds herself dragged to the largest shrine by Yama, with Ami on their heels. The three of them settle in a quiet corner near the outskirts of the crowd.

"How'd the hunting go?" Hiyori asks Yama through a mouthful of food.

"Poorly," the girl sighs. "But there's still plenty of opportunities tonight!"

Ami groans.

"This is supposed to be a time for serious re-evaluation of your life goals, Yama-chan. Take it a little less lightly!"

Yama looks aggrieved.

"I'm not taking it lightly! Marriage is very serious—probably the most serious thing ever!"

Then, her mouth turns up in a disquieting smirk.

"Speaking of which, Hiyori-chan, where's your attractive and still very unattached brother?"

Hiyori rolls her eyes.

"You really must be scraping the bottom of the barrel," she says jokingly, and Ami winces. Yama nearly chokes on her food.

"Ouch."

Hiyori grins at them.

"He and my grandmother are over that way—in the courtyard."

She indicates the throng of people they had just succeeding in extricating themselves from. Ami groans.

"I really wanted to leave my request there, too…" she laments. Yama grabs her by the elbow, and pulls on Hiyori's sleeve so hard she nearly trips.

"Then come on! It's not gonna get any less busy."

"What—wait—!"

She's not quick enough. Yama is dragging them both back into the thick of the crowd.

"Out of the way!" says a stern voice, right behind the three of them. Hiyori automatically steps aside to make room for a paunchy man to pass through, carrying a vat of something huge and steaming. Yama's hold on her sleeve breaks. Her friends somehow end up on the other side of him, with their faces obscured by the trail of steam left in the vat's wake. By the time the air clears, they're looking around for her in bewilderment, and over the tops of the people's heads, Hiyori barely hears them calling her name. Before she can elbow her way back toward them, the crowd carries her in its swell toward the shrine, and she's separated hopelessly from the two of them.

"Ami-chan!" she calls, cupping both hands around her mouth and fighting the flow of the crowd.

"Yama-ch—!"

She trips on her yukata's long hem, and collides heavily with a stranger's back. Both of them yelp, and her full weight pushes him all the way to the ground. Hiyori stumbles, managing to right herself. The person she ran into gets up from the ground, brushing dirt off his knees and elbows.

"I'm so sorry," she begins in humiliation, as the man turns around, scowling. "I was just trying to—"

She cuts off mid-sentence when he turns toward her, and his face comes fully into view.

"They didn't invent the term, 'excuse me,' just for shits and giggles, you know," he says, rubbing his elbows woundedly.

Her prolonged silence draws his attention up to her face, and their eyes meet.

He cannot be there. And yet, he is: solid flesh, the crowd parting around his still form like water.

She doesn't miss the spark of recognition in his eyes. Then his expression, which started out at thoroughly pissed, slides smoothly into neutrality.

"I'm sorry," he says. "It was my fault, actually. Enjoy the rest of the celebration."

He turns away from her again. He's going to brush past her into the crowd; she still has his face vivid in her mind, and now he's about to disappear again. So she does the most natural thing, and panics.

Reaching a hand out, she grabs the back of his yukata, right between his shoulder blades.

"Yatogami."

He stops short, and throws a startled glance over his shoulder at where her hand grips his clothes.

Hiyori doesn't question why it feels like the crowd of people around the shrine has suddenly abandoned them.

"Isn't that what you told me to call you?" she asks, when his silence doesn't end.

His shoulders visibly tighten, and she lets her hand drop from him. He turns back toward her.

"You're joking, right?"

His tone is bitter, openly mocking her, and Hiyori's blood turns to fire.

She's not playing his game. She hasn't worked this hard, she hasn't fought this long to remember him, only to have him pretend they've never met. Especially not since she never thought she'd see him again. Especially not since it's been eight years, and he looks like he's stepped directly from the pages of her hard-won memories into the lamplight.

He has the same pale, eldritch features; the same dark hair falling forward over eyes that have no business in a human face.

Hiyori has no idea what words are about to spring from her mouth, so she decides to just trust her instincts and hope for the best.

"I am Iki Hiyori."

He blinks, and so does she.

She was hoping her instincts would be a bit more inventive, but it's too late now.

"And what makes you think I care about your name?" he asks. The mocking note is gone, but she's still stung.

"Do you not want to remember the names of the people you've saved?" Hiyori shoots back.

He casts a quick glance over his shoulder to where she'd barreled him to the ground a few seconds ago, and he shrugs.

"That seems like an exaggeration. You probably would have just skinned your knee or something."

"Wha—no! Not _that_."

He gazes at her, unimpressed. She feels herself growing desperate.

"You don't remember, really? Eight years ago. You were there. I know it, it _was_ you—and…"

She breaks off, looking around, suddenly aware that his white-clad companion is not nearby.

"If you're looking for Hiiro, she's not with me right now."

 _Hiiro_. That's right. He says the name with a strange inflection, like its owner is already dead, or worse.

Hiyori remembers all at once, every detail of the girl's appearance from eight years ago: eyes like empty graves, skin scattered with the pale lines of a hundred names, and she realizes with a jolt: Hiiro had not wanted her to leave the scene of that massacre alive.

His voice pulls her out of the past, impatiently.

"Hey, lady. Are you here? You awake?"

She blinks back into the present and her voice abandons her. _Is_ she awake? The surrounding crowd is blurry at the edges of her vision, and curiously silent.

It is just she and the Yatogami, and now, he can't seem to take his eyes off of her. They're so blue, so violently blue. Her knees shake.

"Do you really remember me?" he asks.

"Yes," she says.

He keeps looking at her, and she realizes what is so strange about his stare. He regards her as if it is she who belongs to the supernatural, and not himself. She asks:

"Are you really a god?"

The question is unfathomably stupid.

Her peripheral vision picks up the movement of the human crowd, the warmth of lantern-light on human skin, and the pressure of a thousand human lungs expelling night air. He stands in the middle of the crowd around the shrine, unnoticed by any except her. A presence like salt, like ice, among the surrounding embers of mortality.

"Yes."

His right arm reaches up, slightly toward her, but then he lets it fall limp back to his side. The blurriness pushes inward on her; everything but his face swims into black.

"And you should have forgotten me long before now, Iki Hiyori."

/

"Hiyori—oh, thank gods—Hiyori! Are you all right?"

She blinks, and sits up. And the world tips disastrously to her left.

"Ugh."

"Don't sit up yet. Not until you're steady."

Ami, Yama, and her brother are standing around her as she lies on a makeshift bed of empty sacks, while her grandmother kneels next to her. They all look so worried.

"Did something happen to me?" she asks, blinking harder, forcing her eyes to focus.

"We lost you in the crowd, and then when we finally fought our way back, you were on the ground. We're so sorry, Hiyori-chan—!"

She looks up at Ami, smiling reassuringly.

"It's fine; I'm not hurt. I don't feel that bad. Just…sleepy."

To her surprise, she discovers that she is. Very sleepy indeed.

"You should go back home and get into bed right now," Masaomi tells her, scooping one arm under her shoulders and lifting her up, bearing most of her body weight on himself.

"No arguments, little sister."

Hiyori yawns hugely.

"I'm not arguing."

The rest of them smile, and she's glad to see their worries abate with her awakening. But it doesn't help that she's now reinforced her frailty in their eyes. Now, her main point of identity will not only include, "orphaned survivor of the caravan massacre," but will also include "fainting damsel."

She's never fainted like that, just out of nowhere.

 _You should have forgotten me long before now, Iki Hiyori._

"Wait."

Masaomi stops, and Hiyori steadies herself on her own feet, pushing him gently away.

"Did you see someone else, besides me—a man? He had—"

She pauses, trying to put his true appearance into phrases. She fails.

"—dark hair and blue eyes. And a black yukata."

The four of them exchange looks.

"No," Ami says. "You fell down in the thickest part of the crowd, but I didn't see anyone like that."

Hiyori looks at the others, and they shake their heads.

Silently burying her disappointment, she thinks that if she truly lost consciousness, then maybe her mind had simply pulled him out of her memory. That would explain how he wore the same face, aged not by a single line, that she saw eight years ago. She realizes, disheartened, that when he appeared before her just moments ago, the rest of reality did seem to waver, falling apart at its seams.

Maybe she has already stepped too far out of her sanity by clinging to a false name. Maybe she has no business trying to remember a fictional god. She's heard of many, many gods—but never the Yatogami.

Yet, if it was an illusion, how real it seemed. How vivid her memory had built him, down to the sharpness of his nose, the shadows underneath his eyes.

How very, very real he was.

/

Masaomi insists on seeing that she gets all the way into bed before he concedes to return to the celebration at the shrines.

"What if it's something serious?" he asks, assuming the older-brotherly tone of voice that she knows all too well. Hiyori is ready to stop being handled.

"Really, I'm fine. I just got very tired…very quickly."

"And you're sure it's nothing more than that?"

"I'm sure that if you don't give me some space, I'll throw you out of the house myself."

He puts his hands up in mock defeat.

"Fine, fine. I'm leaving! See?"

He backs out of the room, smiling at her, but the lines above his mouth are still worried ones. Once she's left alone, Hiyori leans back onto the low, lumpy mattress, letting out a long sigh through her nose.

Well, she's wide awake now.

Moonlight pours into the large room, and from a distance Hiyori hears the sound of the crowd: the reverent revelers, sending off their prayers to whatever gods may listen. She hasn't even had the chance to make her first request of the year.

But this doesn't occupy her nearly so much as the fact that she's seen him. She's felt him; he is real.

Hiyori can't accept that she merely dreamed up such a presence. She touched him. His clothing was warm. If she can't trust her own skin, then what is she supposed to trust?

Still, as solid and real as he had been, Hiyori can't help but feel that by acknowledging him, by talking to him, and most of all, by remembering him, she has broken one of the most important laws. Her body knew it, even if she did not, and so it had countered her by falling suddenly—embarrassingly—asleep.

And, just like her nine-year-old self, Hiyori no longer questions that he is a god. It is far less strange to think of him as god than it is to allow for the existence of such a human.

How strange that he should appear before her, and then seem to deny their ever meeting. How strange that he seemed to care more about her remembering him than the fact that he had prevented her death.

She lies awake—incredibly awake, as though compensating for her earlier narcolepsy—and wonders why the Yatogami appeared tonight, after so many years. She wonders if that meeting is the last she will see of him. She wonders if the last words she'll ever hear in his voice will be those telling her she should have forgotten him.

 _What a rude thing to suggest._

"I'm not going to forget you," she says angrily, to the silence.

The silence answers, in a voice like wine and honey.

"That's good to hear, little sweet."


	2. two

One second, she is lying frozen, and the next she hurls herself out of bed. Her fingers chatter like teeth, which makes lighting the sputtering candle a long and horrible task.

Then, the candle is lit; she holds it high. Her mind numbs over with panic as her eyes dart around the room, seeking the shadowed corners for any shape crouching beyond the shallow pool of light.

The room is empty. The only movement comes from the patterned shadows, woven by clouds in the moonlight.

Sinking back onto the low bed, Hiyori sets the candle down at her feet. She pulls her knees up to her chest, puts her head between them, and makes herself breathe. Her ribs expand.

No one is hurting her. No one is hunting her.

But for a moment, she is nine years old again. Nine years old, and shrouded in terror and mist on the burning roadside.

She thinks for a second, as soon as her rational thinking returns.

She could return to the shrines—to the crowds of people who are still happy and celebrating among them. She could lose herself in them and hope that whatever voice she heard would lose itself as well.

But instead, she lies back down. She pulls the covers all the way up to her neck, and stares into the candle's spitting flame.

As she shivers, blinking hard and quickly, Hiyori is not sure which is worse: that _he_ has found her, somehow—after all these years—or that he was never there at all. That she is alone…alone, with only his voice in her head for company.

/

She wakes up, only thinking that she would have liked to stay asleep a little longer. She wakes up to someone scolding her.

"Did you want to burn the place down?!"

Her grandmother points a reprimanding finger at the little pool of gray candle wax.

"Oh—I'm sorry!"

Hiyori scrambles to clean up the mess of dripped wax, and while she does, the memory of the voice comes back to her.

It had been Nobu. But her dreams afterward had not held nightmares. She did not feel his rotten breath on her during her dreams—not this time.

She had felt…something else. Her cheeks heat up. Her dreams had been been pale cheekbones, and sharp shoulder blades under her fingers…and _blue_ —impossible, inescapable blue.

She would take it over the wine-colored voice any day.

"Are you really going to clean that up, or will you make an old woman get down on her knees and scrub floors while you sit around starry-eyed?"

Hiyori snaps back to herself.

"Sorry again! Sorry."

/

She decides that she is done feeling helpless.

The treatment she receives from her brother—even her grandmother—after the New Year's festival is enough to make that decision for her.

"You shouldn't stress yourself," Masaomi says, taking a parcel from her as she walks home from the market. "You might faint again."

"I won't!"

"Do you really want to risk it?" he presses, and she snatches the parcel back.

"Yes, I do. Because it won't happen."

Her brother suddenly stops in the middle of the path. Hiyori doesn't notice at first, then nearly trips on her hem when turning around. He faces her with a serious look.

"Something happened to you at the festival."

She stares at him, then covers the short unevenness of her breath with a cough.

"Nothing happened." _Lie._

She swallows.

"I thought I saw someone familiar. That's all."

Masaomi gives her a deeply troubled look, and she feels a stab of guilt. She can't just— _tell_ him. Can she?

"You're different," he says, quietly. "I don't know if that makes me happy or not."

Hiyori turns back to the path without answering him, shifting her weight uneasily between her feet. She may very well be different.

Not many people can say they have come face-to-face with both a demon, and a god.

/

Hiyori finds herself cornered by her two best friends on her way out to the edge of the town.

"I'd ask if you're going off to do something scandalous—but now I know that's not the case, I almost wish I was still ignorant," Yama says. Her smile can only be described as _malevolent_.

"What—?" Hiyori asks, her voice breaking.

Ami pokes her shoulder teasingly.

"I don't know. I think kicking stumps and flailing around with bamboo spears is about as scandalous as Hiyori-chan is going to get."

"How did you—" Hiyori swallows, tries to reassemble the fragments of her composure. "H-how long have you—"

"Oh please, Hiyori-chan. We've known since the start."

Yama smirks, then takes pity on her.

"I saw bruises on your arms—I think it was just a few days after you started—and, like any respectable friends, Ami-chan and I followed you out and saw that ridiculous display you were putting on. Are you hoping to become a court attraction for the emperor?"

Ami cackles as Yama strikes a ridiculous pose—more like someone who has a bad stomach cramp than a trained fighter in battle.

"The amazing Iki Hiyori—watch her wrestle a wild bull to the ground!"

Hiyori's face grows hot, but she snorts with laughter at their enthusiasm.

"Do _not_ tell my grandmother," she says, sternly. "I'm warning you."

Ami waves her off, while Yama fights off the last of her giggles.

"Have fun then, Hiyori-chan. Just don't get carried off by a yokai!"

"She could fight off a yokai with _those_ moves, for certain," Yama snorts, wiping her eyes.

Hiyori sticks her tongue out at them as she waves goodbye.

The road out of town narrows into a cart lane, then—about a ten-minute walk from the last outbuilding—the wide lane sprouts a nearly invisible footpath. Hiyori follows this smaller avenue toward a quiet, bamboo-curtained glen. Stopping underneath one of the largest trees, she pulls out from a shallow burial site a bundle wrapped in cloth. Keeping herself relatively hidden among the tall, shadowy stalks, she strips off her outer garment and changes into the loose, lightweight attire. Nothing like this came from her closet: she had had to craft it herself from old clothes that had once belonged to her brother.

She's been training herself in self-defense for these past few months, keeping her unschooled efforts entirely restricted to this shadow-soaked grove.

The strain of physical activity takes up too much of her mind for her to think about much else. When her muscles are tight and aching—her skin blooming with bruises and the rough hints of new callouses—her body's discomfort chases away anything that might worry her during the day.

It exhausts her too much to think about anything that might visit her at night.

Feeling free and mobile, Hiyori stretches her arms and shoulders high, popping her neck from side to side. It may be an unladylike form of exercise, but she doesn't really care. If kicking tree stumps and flailing with bamboo spears will do anything toward destroying the feeling of terrible vulnerability—of _exposure_ —that has followed her for the past eight years—then she isn't about to complain about the bruising.

A breathless half-hour later, Hiyori sinks breathlessly down next to the trunk of that same tree, her mouth parched and joints complaining.

"A—a break," she gasps out, to whatever wildlife may be listening. "Then, maybe—a little more."

She's still unhappy with her agility, though her speed is growing more impressive. Her secret practices can only get her so far. It's not as though she has a teacher.

During her few minutes of rest, she notices the silence. It's a weird, total silence—completely absent of wind, or insect, or animal. Hiyori's heart jumps ahead of itself a few beats.

"Hello?" she says, into the silence.

There's no response. She's still alone. But the air is waiting for something.

Quickly, she strips off her loose clothes and changes back into her normal wear. The narrow footpath isn't far off, but the long, straight shadows of bamboo seem to stretch even more—reaching dark fingers out for her. Her breath burns in her lungs when she reaches the path.

As she takes a quick pace back toward town and nothing unusual happens, her muscles slowly begin to relax again. There really was nothing there with her. The footpath joins with the larger road, and she begins to hear the distant noise of town and foot-traffic.

As soon as her paranoia begins to taper off entirely, Hiyori hears a distinct rustling from off to her left. She stops. The rustling stops.

Her pulse is so loud—it pounds behind her eyes.

"Hello?"

Something moves amidst the thinly clumped patches of trees next to the path. The shape is dark, and quick. Before Hiyori can view it clearly, she gets the impression of a predatory cat—it moves with the same deadly grace.

"W-who's there?" she calls out, forcing herself to sound braver than she is. She plants her feet wide in the middle of the road, chest drawn up and spine arched to communicate confidence. Hopefully it's convincing.

At first, no one appears. Then, when she shows no signs of backing down, there's a bit more rustling, and the newcomer emerges from the shadows.

Hiyori's breath flies out of her like a bird.

"You."

/

She thought she had seen the last of him.

It's so unexpected—so entirely, _entirely_ out of her realm of reference, that she can't begin to process his appearance.

When she does, the circumstances of their last meeting assail her.

She had been so forward. Humiliatingly so.

Her knees hit the ground with a soft _thump_. She trains her eyes no higher than the ground in front of his feet, but she hears his low noise of surprise.

"What are you doing?" he asks, sounding genuinely baffled.

"Allow me to apologize for my behavior when we last met," she blurts out, still staring at the dirt. "It is no excuse—but I was overwhelmed—"

"You remember that?" he interrupts.

The boy from her memory walks toward her with the caution of a wild animal approaching a wounded hunter, and she ventures to look up again. She nods.

"But…it's been months," he says, quietly. Disbelievingly. "Why do you keep remembering me?"

"Why would I not?"

He looks down at her, and before she can name the fleeting expression on his strange, inhuman face—it is gone again.

"Because no one ever has."

/

"Gods don't exist the same way humans do," he tells her. Instead of making her get up, he simply sits right down on the road in front of her, crossing his legs and staring with disconcerting intensity into her face. She leans back on her heels when it becomes obvious he intends to have this conversation with her—right here, right now.

"What do you mean?"

"Children and animals can see us just fine," he explains, rolling a stray pebble under his fingers. "But regular people have a hard time remembering us. If they do, it's only as faceless strangers. That's why…you recognizing me _now_ is…unexpected."

The pebble pauses under his thumb.

"Well, it wasn't easy," Hiyori admits. "I might not have been able to remember you for as long as I did—without you giving me your name."

He shoots her a sharp glance; she'll never get used to a direct gaze from him. It's too easy to recognize him as the un-human that he is whenever she sees his eyes.

"My name?" he asks, sounding a little apprehensive.

She nods.

"Yatogami."

Hiyori could be imagining it. But she thinks he relaxes a bit, when she speaks that name.

"About that." He clears his throat. "Um. Kind of…a mouthful, right? You can just call me: Yato."

Her tongue silently experiments with the syllables. Ya-to. Such an un-extraordinary name, for someone who claims to be a god.

"All right, Yato…" she trails off, then hurriedly adds: "-sama."

Apparently, gods can blush.

She decides to forego the honorific. After all, they are both sitting in the middle of the road; he lowered himself to speak with her. She may as well acknowledge that equality.

"Yato," she corrects herself, quietly. His face falls.

"Yato-sama was nice," he says, with a hint of wistfulness, and Hiyori finds herself stifling a giggle.

In the distance, there's a sound of wheels, and a rising puff of dust from an approaching cart. Hiyori stands up again, and Yato follows suit. They stand facing each other for a few seconds, and as he looks at her with an unnameable expression, she feels something odd and fluttery in her chest.

After so many years trying to decide what to ask him first, she finds that there isn't a single question on her tongue.

"It was nice to meet you," she says, starting to brush the rocks and dust off her knees. Then, she pauses. "By the way—why did you come back?"

This time, the blush is on _her_ face. It's a presumptuous question, and she's not quite sure how it managed to escape her lips.

Yato doesn't seem to notice her embarrassment. Instead, his gaze drops to the ground, and the soft curve that had found his lips flattens again.

"I'm looking for something around here," he says. "But I don't think I'll find it."

Hiyori waits for something to occur to her: something silver-tongued and charming and full of encouragement.

Instead, she just says: "Oh."

Then, flailing—"Well, I-I'll see you, then!"

She turns around and starts walking away quickly, trying to hide the heat boiling into her cheeks. She doesn't have the nerve to turn around to witness what he's made of her awkward exit.

So she doesn't see his lips part in shock, or the tinge of pink that appears again, in high spots on his cheekbones.

She doesn't hear him say, very quietly: "You might…Hiyori."

/

As she arrives back in the main part of town, Hiyori walks rapidly past the main shrines. The few largest ones are loaded with requests and decorations, and she wonders…why she's never seen _his_ name anywhere.

There are no stories, no songs about the Yatogami. There are certainly no shrines.

A thought occurs to her—so fleeting and foolish that she almost tosses it away at once. But it burrows, tugging at her attention until she can't ignore it anymore—until it is a fully fledged idea. _What if._

It's only fair. Since she was nine years old, she's been remembering him—praying to him, in her own way.

And—after all—he did save her life.

And—after all—she will probably never see him again.

/

Hiyori moves through the rest of the week in a half-stupor. Every few seconds, another moment of her conversation with Yato will replay in her mind, robbing her of her concentration during the most mundane tasks.

From her imperfect memories of eight years ago, Hiyori realizes there's something different about him now. Even at her young age, one look at him had told her exactly what he was. _Magatsukami._ Very solitary—very dangerous. Death had walked in his footsteps.

The boy she had talked to, as both of them sat in the middle of a dusty road, had not fit that description. He had been just that: _a boy_.

And he looked like—maybe—he was trying his best to forget something. Just like she is.

/

A month or so after this encounter, the god named Yato fails to make an appearance anywhere but in her memory.

Hiyori comes into the house shortly after sunset, along with a gust of unexpectedly warm air. She expects the place to still be empty—but, after hearing a soft noise from deeper in the house, she concludes her grandmother must have returned home earlier than expected.

"I'm back," she says, setting her packages down inside the door and brushing her hands off on her clothes. No one answers. Her grandmother mustn't have heard her come in.

"It's so dark in here," she comments, walking over to the low table. She expects her grandmother's voice to tell her to light the lamp.

"Yes," says a gentle, musical voice. A man's. "The sun set early today."

Hiyori's stomach turns to water.

She is nine years old: huddled in the bottom of a wooden cart, shrouded in mist.

"Not even a scream, little sweet?" asks the voice, slithering like a river of ink across the floor. "Can it be that you were…expecting me?"

All at once, her muscles regain their abilities. She flings herself to the far end of the room, toward the door. Her one thought is to get out again, among other people—

"Stop."

Of course, she stops. Her skin has turned to iron, caging her within herself.

All that work to learn how to fight—to get stronger—and now when it matters, her body won't let her move.

He walks behind her; his footsteps are soft, just like his voice. He walks around to her left, keeping just outside her range of vision. Straining, she manages to catch a vague imprint of his figure out of her periphery.

"I'd love to talk to you, but if you insist on running, then this will have to suffice. I just wanted to see you, little sweet…and for you to see me."

 _Then come out from behind me._

"You're probably wondering why I am staying out of sight. Well, to be honest, I'm a little shy."

The predatory smile in the words curls around her neck, raising goosebumps.

"These last eight years haven't been all that kind to me, little sweet. I was rather worried you wouldn't like my appearance."

He sighs heavily, in apparent disappointment. She feels it on her neck, how close he stands to her.

"I suppose you're right. The outside of things doesn't matter all that much."

Something light moves on her neck—a displacement of air—a deep inhale. He's sniffing her throat. Hiyori's stomach convulses, and she tastes acidic bitterness.

"However…you've only grown more beautiful."

She waits for it, and—yes— _there it is._ A talon, beneath her hair. Sweeping down the center of her neck. A talon, followed by hot, rotting breath. The air quivers wetly against the back of her neck, and everything in her gut jumps horribly.

The voice behind her loses its silky persuasion. It trembles.

"How did you steal her face, and her voice, and her spirit? How did I get so lucky…?"

Terror and confusion battle it out in Hiyori's head. _Who is he talking about?_

Then, he asks—"Would you like to see me?"

It's nearly whispered against her skin. Then, with a rough, phlegmy chuckle: "You have to promise not to scream."

He steps away from behind her. She senses him circling around, drawing out a theatric reveal. Her trapped pulse hammers inside her temples.

"Remember, little sweet. Trust me—and don't scream."

Hiyori thinks afterward that he must have been using magic to keep his body together.

The thing that reveals itself could not be alive. It could not move, or breathe, save through supernatural intervention.

Her first impression is of a loose-jointed puppet, dragging its feet through the pool of moonlight into the shortened circumference of her sight. One of its arms is noticeably longer than the other—as though all its bones had been thinned and elongated. The fingernails are just as long, just as yellow and curving as she remembers. But the face is the worst.

One eye is gone, leaving a hollow, skeletal socket. The skin, stretched tightly over the architecture of a disintegrating skeleton, looks like the flesh of a corpse. Limp, hair, as dry as snakeskin, clings to his forehead.

Despite his body's defiance of anything living—anything natural—he smiles with those gray, tombstone teeth—a smile of hunger, and lust, and weird, creeping _wrongness._

"Not pretty, is it?" he asks her, and that smile widens.

Hiyori's legs ache from the position she's frozen in. She can only take shallow breaths, and the dim room begins to blur at the edges. But in the last few moments, she's felt something infinitely worse than her physical discomfort: an insistent, finger-thin pressure inside her own mind, prodding. It spools into her ear, probing the recesses of her brain, along with Nobu's voice.

"Your pretty skin has some worms under it, right? Like that magatsukami you hold so precious in your memory. You'll have to forget him."

Hiyori cannot react. She cannot gasp.

Nobu begins to talk again—rhythmically, lyrically—more like singing than speaking. A twisted lullaby.

"You wouldn't adore him so much if you knew all the things he hides. Do you know what a 'nora' is, little sweet? Of course you don't. But maybe you have heard of the gods who take payment to kill innocent people. Have you heard of what they'll do for the most meagre of sums? They'll skin children. They'll torture whole towns—whole cities. They don't even need a reason."

He steps closer, grinning crazily in her face. And then, she _does_ see it.

 _She sees it—everything he tells her is suddenly before her eyes. Built in thick columns of ash, the landscape is in front of her. It smells like fire, and copper, and shit. Bones spike from the remains of buildings, flesh still hanging from them in tattered, dripping banners. The smoke is thick, and smells like gas and fat._

 _Her eyes sting. The smoke is too strong, and too thick, and it smells like everything she's already lost._

Her eyes are stinging still—not with smoke, but with salt—and tremors crawl up and down the whole, frozen length of her body.

"Have you heard of the creatures who start wars just so they can fuck the corpses left on the battlefield?" Nobu hisses, invading her with his presence—his mind into hers. Hiyori feels a tortured whine leave her throat.

Then, the slick fingers in her ears withdraw. Nobu is breathing hard through his wreck of a nose. His one remaining eye bores into hers, and the proximity of his breath nearly chokes her. Their bodies brush as he leans to whisper in her ear:

"Have you thought of him—this magatsukami of yours—touching you?"

Nearly against her cheek, his voice is hypnotic: wine, and honey, and poison. He pulls away, looking for her reaction.

Even the curse he's laid on her cannot stop the bright heat flooding her face. Hiyori cannot speak; she cannot say, "no, he is not mine."

She cannot say, "yes, I have thought it."

"See?" He responds in satisfaction to her silent confusion. "You have something rotten in you, despite your lovely appearance. Remember this, when you think of him: his hands may be beautiful, but they have been dipped in blood. You don't want him to kiss you, little sweet. His mouth is full of worms."

Nobu's smile stretches wider: a grotesque crescent that pulls his skin over skewering bones.

"You have chosen a demon as your god."

He is close—so close that his spittle flies into her face. His breath is hot, and as putrid as an open grave. And then, as close as he is to her, he is gone—

At once, Hiyori's legs liquify under her. She drops like a stone into the ocean.

/

 _She is in a nightmare: a familiar one that smells like smoke and mist._

"Wake up."

 _—But_ this _voice belongs only to her good dreams—and the smell is not smoke—it's something else entirely—_

"Wake up!"

 _She wants to answer it. She doesn't want the voice's owner to worry about her._

"Hey! Hiyori!"

 _He's never said her name before._

"Come on, please wake up."

Her eyelids fly open. Wherever she is, it's warm. And blue.

"…Yato?"

Hiyori thought he had been holding her—but now she sees that's not true. After her eyes and limbs adjust, she sees that she's on the hard floor. Yato is there, kneeling next to her—but his face is certainly not worried.

If anything, he's _annoyed._

"You really fall down a lot, don't you?" he asks.

Despite her disorientation and shock, Hiyori bites her tongue in sudden irritation.

"And _you_ really like barging into people's homes without asking!"

"I was just making sure you were all right."

He says it like it's a matter of course—like she couldn't be trusted on her own without getting into some sort of trouble. Hiyori scrambles to sit upright, enraged by his patronizing tone—upset even more by the fact that she had, in fact, been in real danger.

Shuddering faintly, she pushes Nobu to the back of her mind.

"I didn't ask you to check on me," she snaps. "And I _don't_ want you to do it anymore. I'm fine—I'm _great_ on my own."

Yato laughs, not unkindly.

"Oh, right! I forgot you were a fierce warrior."

She gasps, clutching her sleeves close to her. Heat rushes into her face, all the way up to her hairline.

"You saw…?"—she clenches her teeth and tries to pull her dignity back together—"H-how dare you?! Have you been— _spying_ —?"

A muscle in his cheek twitches, and his eyes go wide. He quickly snaps back to a flat affect, but the damage is done.

"No."

 _Yes._

Hiyori pushes herself up off the ground to tower over him.

"Well, as you can see, Yato, I'm perfectly all right without your help."

She fidgets some more with her sleeves.

"So…you can leave now."

He snorts, sitting up straighter and glaring at her. Dismissively, he says:

"I figured you'd just accuse me of spying on you anyway, so it's better worth my time to keep an eye on you from here. You're a hazard to yourself and others."

Her nostrils flare. Yato still sits cross-legged on the floor, playing with a loose thread at the hem of his yukata. He looks down at his fingers, so all she can see is the top of his dark head.

And Hiyori, after being preoccupied with his sudden appearance in her home, is hit with a realization: he is here, again. This time in her house.

There is a god in her house. Her knees become a bit shivery.

"I take it you don't know who he really is," Yato says at last.

His voice is low. The room suddenly feels much bigger and colder. She watches his finger keep winding around the loose thread.

"Who?" she asks, even though she already knows.

Yato clears his throat, and his finger stops twirling.

"That…that thing that ran away from me. The one called Nobu."

The air barely passes her lips when she asks: "You—know him?"

"Yes."

He stands up. She blinks, surprised at how quickly he moves. There seems to be so little of him—

Or, that's not it. He walks whatever faint borderline is between the world he comes from, and the one to which she belongs. And that's why he seems to only halfway exist.

"You can say you're fine on your own as often as you like," he says, looking down at her, reminding Hiyori that he has several inches on her. She swallows.

"That won't change the fact that he will come back."

His words don't register with her at first. Then, a cascade of ice hits the bottom of her stomach.

Her grandmother still hasn't come back.

"She's fine—your grandmother."

Hiyori looks up at him again, in shock. He's scratching the back of his neck. He looks—for lack of a better word— _uncomfortable_.

"He won't come back while I'm here. Not for a while, at least."

Hiyori keeps staring up at him. Then, her mouth flattens into a hard line.

"Explain."

He stops scratching his neck, and his eyebrows ascend toward his hairline.

"Explain what?"

" _Everything_."

She breathes in, deeply, then exhales a measured stream of air. Fixing her gaze on his, she demands:

"Explain _everything_ to me, slowly. Without leaving out any details."

His eyes shift away from hers.

"I don't think you want that."

"I don't think it's really up to you what I want."

His fists are clenching and unclenching at his sides, but all his movements freeze when she takes a step closer to him.

"At least tell me about him," she pleads.

She takes another breath, keeping a tight lid on all the vile things that bubble up with the name:

"…Nobu. You can't tell me I don't deserve to know who he is," she says, verging on desperation.

The noise of insects and wind fills the brief silence.

"I would tell you, if I could," he finally says. "But even I don't know, exactly. I just…have to find him."

Yato's words from their last meeting resound in Hiyori's mind: _"I'm looking for something around here. But I don't think I'll find it."_

Hiyori realizes with a stab of clarity: he's been after Nobu this whole time. New Year's—that voice in her room—she hadn't imagined it. Every time Nobu had gotten close to her, Yato had also been there, half a footstep in his wake.

As she silently makes sense of this discovery, Yato breathes a short sigh—like he's relieved she's at last going to leave him alone and stop asking questions. His eyes track a sharp path around the room. They stop, right next to her futon.

"What's that?" he asks, the bright curiosity in his tone a jarring disruption from its earlier seriousness.

"Huh?" Hiyori follows the line of his gaze. _Oh._

 _Oh no._

"It's nothing!" she yells right in his face, moving sideways to shield his view with her body. "Stop snooping!"

Yato stares at her in blank shock.

"If it's nothing, then why are you so red?"

"I'm _not_!"

He sets a hand on her arm and effortlessly moves her aside. He begins walking toward the little object that sits next to the head of the futon.

"You are one of the strangest humans I've ever met," he says, sounding faintly amused. He crouches down to pick it up. "What is this, anyway?"

Hiyori is torn between the half of her that wants to cover her eyes and run, and the half that is about to drag Yato out of her house by the scruff of his neck. As a result, she ends up just standing motionless, frozen in distress.

Yato straightens again, turning toward her and looking in confusion at what is in his hands. It's a small, roughly carved wooden house—small enough to rest in his palm. He holds it up in front of his eyes, turning it back and forth to catch the quickly fading light on the writing carved on its front. Hiyori hears his noise of surprise.

"My name's on this."

Hiyori feels herself nod. "Yes," she hears herself croak.

"Why?"

"Because," she gulps—she's going to hurl—right here, in front of him. How is this somehow just as unnerving as when Nobu had her in his clutches?

"Because, uh—it's…it's yours. It's kind of a…shrine."

She ends up whispering it. During the next few seconds, Hiyori can't look at him. Her knees are clattering. If she ends up falling down again, she'll beg him to just mercy kill her.

"A what?" Yato asks, barely audible.

"A shrine," she repeats miserably.

It's just a little thing. There is no reason for her to be so silly about it. This is what she thinks, so she can force herself to look at him again. But when she does—

"Hiyori."

He says it roughly, like her name is scraping at the inside of his throat. Looking at him, Hiyori feels as though some force has knocked her backward.

Yato is staring down at the little shrine in his hands, tight-lipped. Against the crude wooden corners, his thumbs shake so much that it looks like he might drop it. Then, he sets it down, gingerly, on the floor—quickly withdrawing his hands like the thing is burning him.

"I have to go."

And he does. Quickly, he lifts himself through the window, slipping into the liquid darkness—before she can call him back, or apologize for whatever it is she did wrong.

Her face is hot, and horribly red. She resists the juvenile urge to kick the little shrine to the other end of the room.

Then, she is suddenly tired—so tired she can hardly stand.

The realization that Nobu is following her, stalking her—making it his mission to terrorize and incapacitate her—makes her more weary than it does fearful.

Because, on some level, Hiyori always knew he wasn't done with her.

/

She wakes up in the middle of the night with a start.

"Yato?"

He isn't there. Of course he isn't there. It's someone else—not Yato, or Nobu.

A square of liquid moonlight shimmers like steel on the floor. The whole room smells of moisture—it's chilly. The air is heavy.

Hiyori sits up, and her limbs are slow. Even though her heart is racing, she can't seem to breathe properly. It feels like she's dreaming, or underwater.

"You really aren't anything special," a girl's voice says.

And then she is there, a bare breath away from Hiyori's nose. Her doll's face, as flawless as the surface of a pearl, is even more eerie against the blank coldness of her eyes.

The girl reaches out with a perfect hand to stroke the side of Hiyori's neck. The sleeve of her white yukata slips past her wrist. There are marks. Dozens of them, carved on just a few visible centimeters of flesh.

Hiyori draws a slow, shaky breath as the strange girl lets her finger pause over the staccato thread of her pulse. Her full upper lip quirks up in a sneer.

"So weak. I wonder…"

Hiyori yelps, and the girl brings her hand quickly away from her neck, a bead of crimson quivering at the end of her thumb. She lifts it up, studying it.

Then, she flicks her hand, and the drop flies onto Hiyori's cheek. Hiyori flinches, quickly wiping it off. Then, she holds her own hand up to her neck to press the shallow, pulsing wound left there.

"What do you want?" Hiyori whispers.

"I want to know why he likes you so much," the strange girl answers. "I want to know what you're doing to him."

Hiyori's eyes dart across the girl's face, seeking.

"Who—"

"He can't really protect you," the girl interrupts. "He's not the kind of god who protects."

She smiles, chillingly.

"Only spares."

Hiyori smells the pungent copper of her own blood on the air.

"Then again," the girl continues, "Yaboku has been acting differently now, for a little while."

"Yaboku…?" breathes Hiyori.

The girl giggles, and the sound of it is like a splash of blood in cold milk.

"I suppose you would know him by that other name he gave you. That is _not_ his real name, you know."

Her crystal voice is warped with condescension.

Hiyori at last finds her own, from where it's buried somewhere under the waterweight of this girl's presence.

"What do you want?" she repeats, much more strongly. Suddenly, the recovered name bursts on her memory:

"Hiiro."

The girl gives her a toxic look. Hiyori feels that she has gained some control of the situation.

It doesn't last for long.

"Yato is just the name _she_ gave him," Hiiro whispers, quickly recovering her smile. "That other girl. You look quite similar to her, did you know that?"

Hiyori's insides turn—cold snakes, squirming in her stomach. She doesn't want to ask. She doesn't want to know.

 _"How did you steal her face?"_

It means nothing, she says to herself, pushing the tang of panic to the back of her throat.

 _"How did I get so lucky?"_

It means nothing.

"What 'other girl'?" she asks. Her question is small, and falls flat.

Hiiro laughs again—not her high, cold giggle—but a ringing laugh of victory. And with it, she disappears. All she leaves behind is an echo.

 _Why, the girl he loved, of course._

 _Sakura._


	3. three

_It began, as so many things do, in a shrine._

/

"Hiyori," her grandmother says. "Let's talk."

/

 _A young miko, a maiden of Amaterasu Omikami, took something from the sanctum of her goddess. She stole away with this object in the dead of night on the darkest day of the year. She stole a treasure: the powerful and sacred bow of the Amaterasu shrine. She stole the Hama Yumi, the demon-killing bow, because it had told her how hungry it was._

 _The first night after her crime, the maiden slept like a beggar in the bushes by the roadside. In her sleep, she received a dream._

 _Her dream took the form of a massive snake, its gray and green scales dully reflecting the pale, muted dreamlight. She couldn't have run from it, even if she wanted to. It was one of those dreams._

 _The snake spoke to her._

 _"You are not the first one to come for my treasure," it said._

 _In her dream, the maiden was not surprised that the snake had a pleasant, unassuming voice. The echo of it hung in the air like mist, and even in her dream, the girl began to feel sleepy and comforted._

 _"You are not the first to come, and you will not be the last."_

 _The enormous snake slid itself around her feet until she was encircled completely. Its head reared up in front of her, up, and up, and up. She craned her neck to stare into its ruby-rimmed eyes._

 _"Do you have a name, little human?" the snake hissed down at her._

 _Even encircled within its powerful coils, and even with its poisonous, honey-sweet voice dripping into her ears, the girl knew it was very bad judgment to give her name to a dream monster._

 _"I am no one important," she said._

 _The snake laughed at this. The sound was disturbing: like wind through the cracks of a door._

 _"None of you are important," the snake said, still chuckling as though she had told a very funny joke. "And now, since you have broken the trust of your sworn goddess, you have taken away more than that bow you hide."_

 _Outside her dream, the girl felt the hard, thin crescent of the bow against her back, still swathed in its protective wrappings. The knowledge of its realness comforted and strengthened her. She looked the dream snake in the eye._

 _"The Hama Yumi chose me as its bowmaiden, and I answered."_

 _The snake laughed again, although this time it did not sound amused at all. It was the crazed, humorless laugh she had heard from possessed men. The girl woke up with that laughter tangled in her ears and fire rushing through her veins. She wiped a hand across her forehead and it came away cold with sweat._

 _She traveled onward that day, fighting a fever that stole her strength and played tricks on her senses._

 _/_

Hiyori stares at her grandmother's hands, intent on how they work with the fabric and the needle in her lap.

"Talk about what?" she asks cautiously.

Grandmother smiles, and Hiyori smells a hint of danger.

"Sit down."

She obediently sits with her legs folded under her on the ground in front of her grandmother's chair. The fabric hisses softly against the old woman's ancient skin. The needle darts in, out, in, out: a sinuous water snake.

Her grandmother sighs a tiny sigh, as though she's been putting off this question for quite some time. Hiyori's stomach drops preemptively.

"How long have you been seeing the god?" her grandmother asks.

Hiyori's jaw works open and shut, but no sound comes out.

"You have hidden a shrine in my house," Grandmother continues. "With a mysterious name on it. You have disappeared many times in the middle of the day, and you come home happily covered in sweat and bruises."

The cloth settles in the old woman's lap, and her wrinkled hands fold over each other.

"And you are wearing a look these days, my cloud girl," she says quietly. "One I haven't seen on you in many years."

Hiyori meets Grandmother's sharp, truth-seeking gaze for several seconds. Then she drops her eyes to her own hands. It's impossible to figure out where to begin explaining herself.

Grandmother sets the fabric down next to her chair, carefully laying the needle on top of it.

"I think it's time for me to show you something."

Hiyori dares to look up again. Grandmother's voice is steel when she says:

"It's also time to tell you…you are not the only one who can see things."

/

 _After a day of fevered travel toward her village, the girl collapsed once again on the side of the road._

 _And, once again, the snake slithered its quiet, poisonous way into her dreams._

 _"If you use the bow for your own purposes, the gods will never smile on you," it whispered. The snake's voice was so gentle, so kind—as if the only thing it cared for was her welfare._

 _The girl knew this was a trick. Dream creatures such as this were full of shadows and whispers and lies._

 _"If you return the Hama Yumi now," the snake told her, "and if you beg forgiveness for seven days and seven nights, you can save your soul. If you swear to devote your existence to her worship, Amaterasu Omikami will pardon you."_

 _"The bow is meant to be used," the girl retorted._

 _"And you believe it chose a soft, temporary thing like you?" the snake taunted._

 _"I'm the only one who answered it."_

 _The snake circled her again, drawing its coils close around her waist, her chest, her neck. The girl felt something even worse than its suffocating hold on her—something slimy inside her ear, like a soft, probing finger. It was a sensation that was far too real to have any business in a dream._

 _"You shouldn't listen to everything you hear inside your little head, human."_

 _The girl gasped awake, like a drowning person breaking above the water. She filled her lungs with all the air she could manage, and dug her fingers in her ears to make sure nothing was hiding there. Clutching the bow protectively to her stomach, she drew courage from its song against her skin._

 _She was right to have taken it. She had done the right thing. But after that dream, she tried not to think about snakes anymore._

 _She could also see the ayakashi._

/

Hiyori does not really understand what is happening when her grandmother rises smoothly from her chair. She flicks her hand at Hiyori: a slight motion indicating that she is to follow.

She feels the first twinges of realization as her grandmother leads her to the back of the house and into the small, dead garden patch. Hiyori stands in the place her grandmother points to.

"Dig," she says.

Hesitating for only a moment, Hiyori kneels down and begins to paw in the hard winter dirt with her bare hands. Her grandmother silently joins her: wrinkled hands working alongside smooth.

A few inches into their task, Hiyori's fingertips brush something that does not feel like rock or soil. She digs faster, uncovering the fabric wrappings that have caked stiff with dirt and age. With some difficulty, she pries the wrapped object from its grave and sets it at her grandmother's feet. Whatever rests within the cloth is long and light, and something clatters when Hiyori sets it on the ground.

Grandmother crouches next to it, brushing reverent, wrinkled fingers over the dusty cloths.

"I meant to let the knowledge of this die with me," she says, prying the wrappings gently open. The light pours over shining wood and taut string. "But you have caught the attention of some very nasty creatures, Hiyori."

Whether through some god's magic, or the simple protection of the sacred cloths, the polished longbow is spotless after its time in the ground. Alongside it lies an _ebira_ and five slender arrows, each of them as silver as the moon. Hiyori's pulse catches unevenly at the sight.

"Was it you?" she asks her grandmother weakly. "Were…were _you_ the one who took this?"

The mild, mid-day sun gleams off the silver arrows to dance in the old woman's hair.

"No," she responds. "It was a girl who lived many generations ago in our family. Thanks to her, the Iki women have always been able to see the creatures of the Far Shore."

Grandmother drapes the cloth back over its contents, and straightens up with a slight groan.

"Thanks to her, we're a bit cursed."

Hiyori swallows.

"But some people have more respect for superstition than others," Grandmother says as she continues stretching her stiff spine. "Even though I could see things that didn't make sense, I had trouble believing in the gods. That is, until _my_ mother dug this up and showed it to me herself."

Hiyori looks at the bow and arrows. They are beautiful, but they don't really seem supernatural. Grandmother either doesn't notice her skeptical silence, or she simply chooses not to acknowledge it.

"And then, of course, I only had a son," she continues with a soft, ironic laugh. "He wanted to see more than what this little village had to offer. So he left, to raise his family elsewhere—and then you came."

Hiyori shivers.

A column of foul-smelling flames on the roadside. A monster with a seductive voice. Girls who smell like water, and cut like glass.

 _And then you came_.

The Iki women are a bit cursed.

"None of us—" Hiyori asks, then readjusts the question. "I mean, _you've_ never used that thing? The bow?"

Grandmother chortles, this time a bit more mirthfully.

"I never needed to. But you are a special sort of trouble, little cloud. The shadows have always tried to follow you home."

/

 _The ayakashi did not approach her. They knew better than to challenge the bowmaiden of the Hama Yumi. Still, she didn't like seeing them._

 _They were multi-headed demons that floated and chittered and shrieked. Sometimes, worst of all, they called out in familiar, humanlike voices. In her fever, during the long walk home, she thought she heard her family talking to her. They begged for her to come over to them._

 _"Cross the line," they whispered. "Cross the line. Come over to us. Cross over now. CROSS…THE…LINE."_

 _"I am not like you," she said._

 _Their answer froze her blood._

 _"Not…yet…"_

 _/_

The evening is quiet. Hiyori is grateful for the solitude, because she's not sure she could feign anything close to normalcy after the revelations of the afternoon.

After bringing the bow and arrows into the house, her grandmother weaseled out of her the details of her interactions with Nobu. Confiding those events has helped Hiyori more than she expected. The emotional burden is lighter: merely a thin iron chain around her neck, rather than a millstone.

Still, she had managed to keep secret her acquaintanceship with the Yatogami. That's something she can't find it in herself to share.

The sacred bow sits in the next room over. Hiyori is hyperaware of it, like a wasp in the house.

Grandmother clicks her tongue once, and Hiyori looks over at her. She's fussing over the food, but Hiyori can recognize a lecture a mile away.

"That _shrine_ , you foolish child—! Inviting kami into my house, without my knowledge—"

Hiyori winces, but her grandmother soldiers on: "Of course, you couldn't know it would invite other things too, but still _…"_

She sighs deeply, as though her granddaughter's temporary sojourns into the misty land of gods and demons are simply a brief and regrettable outburst of teenage rebellion. She flicks a hand toward the air, dispelling the distasteful idea.

"And now you seem to worship a magatsukami, which isn't exactly what someone my age wants to hear—"

Hiyori gasps in horror, clutching both hands over her heart.

"You—you _know_ about that?!"

Grandmother clicks her tongue again, louder. "I know now."

Hiyori wonders if it's physically possible to perish of humiliation.

"You're lucky that magatsukami seems to like you so much," Grandmother observes with an incomprehensible smile. "Otherwise, you'd be past saving."

Hiyori sputters incoherently and blushes with enough ferocity to melt the skin from her bones. Her grandmother has already brushed her hands off and walked into the next room. She returns with the wrapped bow and arrows in her arms.

"Come, little cloud," Grandmother says. "Since you summoned that evil 'Nobu' thing to this place, you can at least learn how to defend yourself. And I don't mean with your crude punches and kicks."

Hiyori's blush won't fade. She stares from the bow, to her grandmother, back to the bow again. Grandmother sets it down on the floor to unwrap it, and Hiyori is struck once again with how shiny it is.

Maybe all holy relics are shiny. This is the first one she's ever seen.

"You mean—with that?" she quavers. It seems illegal to touch the thing, let alone shoot with it.

"What else?" Grandmother asks perfunctorily. "Unless you plan to throw that little shrine of yours at him."

Hiyori presses her lips together. She stalks up to her grandmother and holds her hands palm-up, waiting. There's a single breath of silence before Grandmother smiles.

"Good."

She sets the bow in Hiyori's hands.

It's much lighter than it looks. Her fingers close around it; she feels the faint _hum_ of the string throughout the wood. Hiyori shuts her eyes to listen.

The bow is singing.

It has a thrilling voice. It is the music of wind, and war, and magic. It is music that makes Hiyori's veins feel full to bursting, and her heart plunge frantically to keep up with its beat. It is music that sings not with breath and tongue, but with bone and muscle.

It tells her it is hungry.

She opens her eyes again.

Grandmother is still looking at her. A slow, pleased smile draws creases under her bright eyes.

"I think you are holding it wrong, little cloud," she says.

 _/_

 _The snake came back to her dreams. This time, it came back as many, many snakes, all with the same pleasant, deadly voices. They said in unison:_

 _"Return the Hama Yumi."_

 _The snakes attacked her. They slithered along her body, between her lips, down her throat, quivering and hissing in her stomach._

 _"If you return it, your death will be painless. If you return it, your fate will not be the fate of an ayakashi."_

 _The dream snakes wound inside her arms and through her fingers, making her body something that was not hers. The snakes wrapped her in an unfamiliar skin, and moved her in ways she did not want to move._

 _"Tell us your name, little human, and you will wake up from this."_

 _Her tongue was still hers, and she did not speak. The snake who was many snakes had taken her body, but not her voice._

 _"What is yours?" she asked._

 _The snakes stopped moving. She listened to the silence for a moment, then asked again:_

 _"Do you have a name?"_

 _"They did not give me a name," the snakes whispered. From her heart, where the snake heads had buried their fangs, she could feel their emptiness._

 _"Is that why you want mine?" she asked._

 _The snakes did not answer her. They released her heart, and wriggled out through her body, pouring out of her mouth and from under her fingernails and from her eyes like long, dark tears._

 _The bowmaiden woke with a cry, clutching the Hama Yumi tightly to her chest. The fever claiming her ever since she left the shrine had finally broken._

/

When Hiyori finds herself in the clearing again, it isn't to throw punches and kicks at invisible enemies.

She holds the bow with more confidence than she did the first time. Its song does not surprise her as much, now that she knows to expect it.

She didn't bring the arrows with her. Instead, she searches around her feet for long, slender sticks—long enough to serve as makeshift projectiles. There aren't too many of the kind she wants, so she has to be careful to collect them afterward. Once she has found four or five, Hiyori looks around for a target. Eventually, she has to settle for a small rock balanced on one of the lowest tree branches at the edge of the clearing. It's not what she would have chosen, but it will have to do.

Hiyori sighs. This isn't even the hard part. Retreating to a fair distance, she eyes the stone balancing on the branch.

Her stomach sinks. It is so very small. Maybe this wasn't the right way to practice.

As if in response to her trepidation, the bow thrums against her sweating palm. It wants to be used. It wants her to trust it.

So Hiyori closes her eyes, and tries to.

The first thing she notices is the smell. Every tiny forest scent clamors against her senses: sap, and animal droppings, and old smoke, and something else she doesn't recognize. Something pleasant and musk and otherworldly. The back of her nose burns with the influx of sensation. She takes a shallow inhale before raising the bow.

The second thing is the music, humming through her fingers and down her arm to the rest of her body. The bowsong spiders out through her nerves, raising every hair on her arms and the back of her neck. The music unsettles her with its restless desire. It reminds her that although the bow is an ancient and sacred relic, it is also a weapon.

It is also hungry.

She opens her eyes. The forest is blurry and silent around her. The only thing she can see—the only thing that is _real—_ is the stone on the branch, her target. Hiyori takes aim.

A crash—like a huge, wounded animal stumbling through the forest—breaks her focus.

Hiyori drops the stick, and the bow falls to her side. She stares wildly around the clearing, seeing nothing that could cause the commotion. But her nose, sharpened by the bowmagic, is overwhelmed with a thick, coppery scent that nearly makes her gag. Suddenly, there's a shout—a human shout, immediately cut off and followed by another series of crashes and thumps.

Without hesitation, she takes off across the clearing toward the noise, the bow knocking against her leg with every stride.

/

 _The bowmaiden had only one more night before she arrived at her home._

 _She knew what would be waiting in her sleep, even before she closed her eyes. "I'm not returning the Hama Yumi," she began, but the snake interrupted her._

 _"Little girl, I already know you won't."_

 _She gazed up, uncomprehending, into the snake's large, triangular face. Its tongue flickered lightning-quick between thin, scaly lips._

 _"I am here to propose an exchange," it said._

 _The bowmaiden cast all her guards up. Exchanges with dream creatures were always one-sided._

 _"If you give me a name, I will abandon my job as the bow's guardian," said the snake. "You will not dream of me any longer, and the bow will be yours as long as you can hide it."_

 _She waited for the other part of the bargain. She waited for the snake to tell her what the_ real _price was._

 _"Will you accept?"_

 _The bowmaiden hesitated._

 _"If all you wanted was a name," she said slowly, "then…why wait to ask me? Why not sneak into another person's dreams and bother them for one?"_

 _The snake laughed, and rather than the hissing noise she had heard before, this laugh sounded almost…human._

 _"The Hama Yumi and I are bound tighter than you know," the snake told her. "I am chained to it—compelled to visit its master three times before I can make my own request. And here you are, little bowmaiden. You have passed my test."_

 _She was still wary. Something felt missing. A name was such a simple thing to give._

 _"This is all you must do," the snake said, bending its long body in a circle around her feet. "Give me a name, and I will leave your dreams alone forever. I will be in your debt."_

 _She thought: what if it were true?_

 _"Please, sweet bowmaiden," it asked pleadingly, sorrowfully. She felt pity for this nameless creature, for this monster with the stretched body and the wooing voice._

 _The bowmaiden decided._

/

She follows the noise, sometimes clipping her head on a branch or entangling herself in deep vines. The crashing grows louder, punctuated by scuffles and grunts.

Then the first voice cries out again, fractured with pain, and Hiyori's breath catches.

She trips through the thick underbrush, toppling unsteadily toward the thinning of the shadows. It spills her out at the edge of another dim clearing.

Someone is laughing. She's heard that laugh before. Terror pours down her spine.

"You aren't much without that nora of yours, are you?" someone shrieks gleefully. A fleshy, awful sound of impact makes Hiyori cringe farther back into the shadows. The iron taste in the back of her throat nearly chokes her.

Another grisly _smack_ echoes through the trees, and a cry of agony rends the air.

Hiyori's feet begin carrying her forward before she can do anything to stop them. When she bursts through into the muted sunlight, her sudden appearance arrests the two fighters in their tracks.

She first sees Nobu.

He is more more disturbingly inhuman in the daytime than he is at night. Despite the shriveled twigs that pass for his arms, he has a convincingly large rock raised above his head, ready to smash down on his target below.

The target—in this case—Yato.

Splayed with his back against the forest floor, he heaves broken, tortured breaths. When he turns his face toward her, one of his eyes widens in shock. The other seems to be crusted over with something unpleasantly dark and oozing. Hiyori gasps at the state of his face and neck: tattered with half-healed cuts, bruises spreading a mottled mosaic down his chest and disappearing under his mud-caked yukata.

"Hiyori…?" he wheezes. His expression works its way from disbelief to terror.

"Hello there, little sweet," Nobu says. He still holds the stone aloft, positioned over Yato's unprotected skull. "You've come to see me after all?"

Yato quickly rolls toward Nobu's ankles, sweeping them out from under him. The rock flies from his grip and hits the mud with a wet _thwack_. Hiyori can't see much from her distance, except for the fact that both men seem to be weaponless. This does not stop either of them from throwing fierce elbows into each other's throats.

Nobu rapidly gains the upper hand again due to his opponent's injured state. He grabs both Yato's arms, yanking them back and down behind his body. He twists forcibly, popping the right arm cleanly out of its socket. He jabs his leg up and against the elbow of the now-useless limb. Yato's arm bends in a way that it shouldn't, and she can hear the snap of splintering bone.

A devastating scream makes Hiyori's hair curl.

Nobu releases Yato's weight, and he slumps forward into the mud. The right side of his face hits the ground first. Hiyori sees his arm buckled wrongly at his side, like a tree root ripped from the ground. There is mud all over his yukata, in his hair, smeared in clumps of reddish black over his torn face and throat. To her, right then, he doesn't look like a god at all.

He looks like a boy who is about to die.

/

 _"I name you Nobu," said the bowmaiden, and she woke._

 _The snake was still there when she woke up—except he was a man in the world of the living. He stood tall over her, admiring his new skin and limbs._

 _He was not a handsome man. There was a reptilian sheen to his skin, and a wrongness about the shape and color of his eyes, and his teeth when he smiled down at her were gray and large. He held a hand down, a silent offer to help her stand up. When she saw the long, swollen fingernails, she recoiled._

 _"Thank you, Tamanone," said the snake who was now a man._

 _Her heart stopped when he spoke her name, and his terrible smile grew a bit wider._

 _"We had an exchange," he reminded her. She began backing away from him, sick with the knowledge of what she had done. Then, the Hama Yumi began to sing. It was an awful sound, splitting the morning mist with its rage. The girl named Tamanone covered her ears and curled into herself to wait until the singing stopped._

 _The singing either ended very quickly, or it never ended at all. Regardless, when she looked up again, Nobu was gone. She glanced at the Hama Yumi on the ground, and it looked the same as it always had. Its bowstring lay silent. She reached toward it hesitantly._

 _When she touched it, her fear was confirmed. The Hama Yumi had revoked its choice, because she had released the demon. She bent over the Hama Yumi and wept._

 _It would protect her, but it would never sing._

/

"Yato!"

Hiyori stumbles toward him, desperate for a sign that he's conscious—for him to move at all, for a muscle twitch, _anything._

Nobu takes a step back to pick up the rock that had been knocked away. He pauses after lifting it up, his back toward Hiyori as he tests its weight in each hand.

She drops to her knees next to Yato, letting the bow fall out of her grip as she reaches forward. She stops just short of touching him, fluttering her hands uncertainly over his body and trying to gauge whether her attention will only injure him further.

"So the magatsukami has a real name after all," Nobu says musingly, pondering the rock in his hands.

"Yato, wake up," Hiyori begs.

She builds up her courage to touch him, but only to brush the muddy hair out of his face. His eyes are closed. she lifts an eyelid to see his eyes are rolled back in his head.

"That would have been useful to know," Nobu continues, speaking to himself. Then he turns back to Hiyori, cradling the heavy rock in his emaciated arms like an infant.

"Please, Yato," she says, half-sobbing. She gently shakes his shoulder, careful not to move the damaged arm. No response.

Hiyori lets go of his shoulder. She cups his upturned cheek in her palm and leans forward, all the way until her forehead brushes his temple. His skin is very warm. He smells so beautiful and alive. Hot and quick, two tears slip down the end of her nose to splash onto his cheekbone.

On the other side of Yato's body, Nobu's footsteps approach.

The fingers of Hiyori's left hand find the bow in the mud next to her, wrapping tightly around it.

"Hold out your hands, little sweet," says Nobu. His honeyed voice is thick with anticipation.

"I think I'll like watching you kill him."

Hiyori's hands twitch. But she does not take the rock.

Nobu makes a soft, surprised noise.

The bow has taken Hiyori's hands away from her. The song of it thrums through her muscles, winds itself in liquid silver armor around her fingers. Protecting. Preventing.

"What kind of bow is that?" Nobu asks. His voice has lost its honey.

Hiyori lets out a quiet breath, stirring the hair against Yato's forehead. Her hand tenses around the bow.

The shaft of an arrow presses into her knee, even though she had not brought any with her. _I am hungry._

"Oh, for the love of all the gods—" Nobu hisses. He grunts, lifting the rock high. The air shivers around them, tight as the atmosphere before an explosion.

Hiyori sits back on her heels.

"I want you to stop calling me 'little sweet'."

A silver arrow sings past Nobu's head. It carries his ear away with it.


	4. four

Hiyori isn't sure how she gets Yato back to town. The sun is sinking into the mountains by the time she pounds her fist against the closed door of her house.

Masaomi opens it. His eyes widen in alarm at her sweat-streaked, exhausted appearance. It doesn't help that her knees are quivering under the weight of the bloody, half-conscious stranger draped across her shoulders. Hiyori tightens her right arm around Yato's waist, gripping his left wrist where it knocks against her collarbone and shifting him slightly more upright. At the small movement, Masaomi's attention focuses on Yato, and the color drains from his face.

"Who…"

Hiyori is about to collapse under hers and Yato's combined weight. Her right elbow jars his crushed arm, and he whimpers. "I know this looks odd," she hisses, and Masaomi blinks at the understatement. "But can you _please_ help me?"

Together, they heave Yato's uncooperative body into the house, onto a blanket that Grandmother hastily spreads on the middle of the floor. As she unwinds his left arm from around her neck, Hiyori is about to lay it carefully across his stomach. Before she can let go, his fingers clench around hers. Hiyori's breath catches in her nose. She tries to move her hand away again, and wrinkles delve into Yato's damp, pale forehead forehead. So she takes his hand again: her hot fingers against his cool ones. The wrinkles on his forehead ease.

Hiyori looks up at her grandmother, who is silently witnessing the whole event. Her eyebrows have ascended nearly to her hairline.

"He's hurt," Hiyori whispers. Grandmother reaches for her face, stroking Hiyori's sweaty hair back from her forehead. "He's broken," she corrects. Hiyori is too tired to figure out how the two differ.

Masaomi comes back into the room with an armful of clean rags. He dumps them on the floor next to Hiyori, then gives a pointed glance to where her hand and Yato's are linked. "So…who's the corpse?" he asks. Grandmother lets out a slow exhale. Then, she chuckles.

"This is, I believe, a stray."

/

Night settles outside the house. Grandmother brings Hiyori a bowl of something that steams. She sets it down on the floor next to her folded knees, and Hiyori smells mushrooms and eggs.

"He's not going to wake up for a while," Grandmother says. Hiyori nods heavily. The whole day has left her drained and numb. She's spent hours scooping rocks and debris out of Yato's open wounds, dabbing them clean, and wrapping them in bandages fashioned from the rags Masaomi brought. She watches her hands move over Yato's body as though they do not belong to her anymore. Her fingers work as an entity unto themselves, detached from the pulsing ache inside her skull.

Hours earlier, Masaomi had crouched on Yato's right side, his narrow fingers prodding the area of the break.

"I've never set a bone before," he had said doubtfully. "Are you sure you don't want me to fetch the doctor—?"

Hiyori had shaken her head vigorously. It turned her stomach to think of bringing someone outside her family in to see Yato like this. It felt somehow disrespectful. Masaomi had sighed, heaving himself upright once more. He looked around the room for a moment, his eyes going slightly out of focus. It wasn't the first time this had happened since Hiyori brought Yato into the house. She had cleared her throat, jerking her head toward Yato to jog her brother's memory into gear. Apparently the ability to remember him was limited to the women in the family.

"Right," Masaomi had muttered, his eyes clearing.

Now, Hiyori watches her grandmother studying Yato with unnerving focus.

"You said you didn't see anyone," Hiyori says.

Grandmother lifts her eyes from Yato's motionless body. "Pardon?"

"During the New Year celebration," Hiyori says. "After I fainted. You said you hadn't seen anyone with me—even though you must have seen _him_."

She looks back down at Yato. His chest rises and falls under the thin blanket. Her hand yearns to arrange his limbs more comfortably, to straighten the cover over him, to smooth the hair out of his eyes.

"I didn't see him," Grandmother says.

A surge of irritation rushes through Hiyori. "How!?" she demands. "You see him now! Nothing is different now than it was then!"

The half-smile that always seems to live on Grandmother's mouth vanishes suddenly. "Worship is powerful, Hiyori," she says. "Far more powerful than you realize. I wouldn't be shocked if you kept this poor boy alive through sheer resolve."

Hiyori is suddenly very aware of the miniature shrine that lays overturned in the corner of the room.

"And now I have another job," Grandmother says. She stands up, twisting her spine, the vertebrae cracking in a noisy orchestra of stiffness and aches. Hiyori gives her a confused look.

"You left something out there, didn't you?" Grandmother says by way of explanation. Hiyori sucks in a breath. _The bow._ She scrambles to her feet, narrowly avoiding toeing Yato in the ribs.

"I'll go for it," she says. "It's dark out there, and you don't know where I dropped it."

Grandmother waves a hand airily.

"Stay with him," she says, nodding her head toward the still-unconscious Yato. "I think he's more comfortable with you next to him."

Hiyori opens her mouth. Her face reddens, and she shuts it again.

"It should be near the—"

"The clearing where you practice?" Grandmother interrupts. Hiyori's face gets somehow more red. All those months of sneaking and evasion had done her precious little good.

"Yes," she mutters.

Grandmother moves quickly around the room, pulling on a cloak and lighting a lantern that glows like a tiny sun in the shadows.

"I'll be back soon, Hiyori," she says. "Don't let in any more yokai."

Hiyori glances at the god lying on their floor and smiles, though the blush on her cheeks won't fade anytime soon.

"I won't."

/

Hiyori jerks awake, dragged out of a pitch-dark slumber by something rustling in the room.

She paws around for the candle—which has melted down nearly onto the floor next to her—and struggles for a moment to relight it. The flame sputters disconsolately to life, and by its light she sees Yato is no longer lying there on the floor next to her. There's a scraping noise, like a wounded animal trying to drag itself across the floor, and Hiyori sits up, lifting the candle above her head. She squints in the feeble light.

Across the room, Yato is trying to get out through the open window.

Hiyori stands up, unsteady on her sleepy legs. "What are you doing?" she asks in a croak.

Yato stops halfway through the window, one leg still dangling absurdly inside the room. He blinks back at her, his useless right arm slung against his body. The reflected candlelight makes his eyes look like two blue coals.

"Nothing," he says.

"You can't be up!" Hiyori whisper-screams. "You need to lie down again."

Yato slithers a bit further out the window, wincing.

"I'm fine."

Hiyori, struck dumb with disbelief, watches him shimmy over the windowsill. He loses his balance, landing on the other side with a sad thump. She marches over to the window and leans out, extending the candle so she can see him lying on the ground. Yato squints up at her, his eyes watering in pain.

"You're fine?" Hiyori asks tartly.

He nods jerkily, his body crumpled on the cold ground.

Hiyori sighs. She retreats inside the window, and uses the candle in her hand to light a larger lamp. The lamp gasps to life, sending the shadows in the room huddling into the farthest corners. Hiyori takes the blanket from the floor where she had been sleeping, retrieves the candle, then slides into her sandals and walks out the door. Rounding the edge of the house, she finds Yato still curled pathetically into himself like an injured kitten.

"You're awful at 'thank you's,' you know," she grumbles, kneeling next to him with his back curled against her knees. Yato makes a soft coughing noise that could be mistaken for a laugh. She drapes the blanket around him, trying not to think too much about how warm he is through the fabric, how nice he smells even lying here in the mud.

"I can't carry you back in," she says. "I need you to try to get up."

She withdraws her hands from the blanket, and her finger accidentally brushes the side of his neck. They both stiffen.

"Sorry," Hiyori murmurs, boiling with embarrassment.

Yato is silent for a long moment. Then, with a groan, he uncurls himself from the fetal position and sits up without looking at her.

"It's cold out here," he says.

With considerable difficulty, and a lot of agonized groaning, Hiyori succeeds in getting Yato on his feet again. She loses a moment wondering how on earth he got all the way across the room to the window without waking her, when now every slight movement causes him to hiss in pain.

Walking back into the house is another manner of torment completely, because Hiyori once again has his arm slung across her shoulders, hers looped around his waist. She had drawn strength from somewhere deep inside herself to half-carry him all the way from the forest, but this short walk around the corner of the house seems ten times longer. His labored breath is right next to her ear, and something low in her chest starts quivering uncontrollably.

Once they get across the threshold and properly into the house, Hiyori dumps him down on the blanket rather more roughly than she intended. Yato yelps.

"Sorry," she gasps. "Um. Tea?"

He looks up at her, his mouth scrunched in pain. "Wh—?"

"I'll make tea," Hiyori interrupts, rushing into the kitchen. Her hands are shaking so violently she almost sets fire to the floor mat instead of the kindling in the stove. Trying to calm her racing heart, she takes significantly more time than necessary to prepare the tea to boil. She cannot hear anything from the next room. Once the water is merrily boiling and the trembling heat in her chest has somewhat subsided, Hiyori notices that she is hungry.

Taking a deep, steadying breath, she walks back into the adjoining room. Part of her expects to see Yato trying to climb out the window again, but he is still there on the floor. He's wrapped both the blankets around his shoulders, so to Hiyori he looks like nothing more than a pile of fabric with a messy, pale head poking out the top.

Screwing up her nerve, she asks: "Are you hungry?"

Yato's ears perk up, and his eyes brighten.

"Is there food?" he asks, as though unable to believe his luck.

"I can make something," Hiyori says, glancing back over her shoulder into the kitchen. She could make some rice quickly…and maybe some soup…

Hearing a strange noise, Hiyori turns back to Yato, only to find him scooting along the floor toward her. He looks like a very strange, very large species of crab, bundled up in a blanket and using his one good arm to push himself along.

"What are you doing?" she asks in outrage.

"Gonna help," he grunts.

"How?"

He answers only with a loud, pained grumble. Hiyori widens her stance, effectively blocking his way into the kitchen.

"You are not going to try to help me," she says firmly.

Yato glares up at her, his eyes narrow and cold. The thought flickers through Hiyori's head that those eyes have been the last thing many people have seen. But she crosses her arms and meets him with a stern glare of her own. Yato caves first. He drops his gaze to the floor in front of him and doesn't look up again. Instead, he reaches forward with his good arm, absently digging his pointer finger into the space between the floorboards.

After a few moments of awkward silence, the only noise the scratching of Yato's finger in the dirt, Hiyori says hesitantly:

"I—I would let you help, if you could stand up, or do anything with both your arms, but since you _can't_ —"

"If you paid someone to help, then would you let them?" he interrupts. It's not an impolite interruption; the meditative way he asks it makes Hiyori think he simply wasn't listening to her.

"Yes, I…I suppose so," she says, bewildered.

Yato pauses. Then, he holds something up between his index and middle finger—something round, with a square hole in the middle. Hiyori stares at it, unable to recognize it at first in the dim lighting. The dull metallic surface is dull with a lifetime of grime from where it had lain between the floorboards.

Hiyori stares at it, then at Yato, her mouth hanging open.

"Five yen?" she asks in disbelief.

He cracks a grin.

/

As it turns out, all Hiyori can really do is give him the mundane task of checking the water to let her know when it's boiling. He frowns.

"I'm good with sharp things," he says sulkily, watching her mince herbs. Hiyori's lip twitches.

"Can't I stir something?" he whines. She silently hands him the bowl of uncooked rice. He takes it from her one-handedly, scowling into it as though the rice has personally injured him.

"Sift through that and see if you find any bugs."

"That's not—"

"Or you won't eat any of it," she finishes sternly. He bends his head over the rice, obediently picking through the grains for traces of infestation. They work in silence for several more minutes. Outside the window, the night is velvet darkness. Hiyori peers through it, wondering whether midnight has already passed.

"The rice is clean," Yato announces, pushing the bowl away. "What else?"

"Is the water boiling?"

"Not yet."

"You didn't look at it."

"I'd hear if it were boiling."

Hiyori sighs. "Crack this egg," she instructs. Yato takes the egg and happily cracks it into the bowl she hands him.

"Good job. Now watch the water." He grumbles, but allows her to work in silence for the next few minutes. Eventually he says: "It's boiling."

"Put the rice in, please."

Hiyori squints her eyes against the sting of the onions. The rice slides hissing into the water, and Hiyori hears Yato put the lid back on the pot. Blinking fast, she sets the onions aside and prepares to move on to the carrots.

"What's wrong?"

She whirls around, the knife in her hand narrowly missing Yato's chest.

"Why are you standing up?!" she demands, her hand still aiming the knifepoint at his sternum. "And don't _do_ that—!"

"Sorry," he says, automatically. He doesn't look away from her stinging eyes.

"What's wrong?" he repeats. His eyes are such a bright, strange blue. They seem to cast their own light in the dim room. She forgets to blink, and a single tear creeps from the corner of her eye. His gaze immediately drops to it.

"Onions," Hiyori says breathily. A second tear follows the first. And then a third.

Yato looks down at the knife held between them. He raises his left hand, and gently takes it from her grip to set it behind her. Hiyori squeezes her eyes shut, but more tears leak down her cheeks, dripping from her nose and chin.

"They're strong onions," she says, swiping at her face with a sleeve.

Behind her eyelids, playing across her vision in nightmarish color, Nobu stands over Yato's limp body with a rock raised in his fist—a rejected shrine lies gathering dust in a dark corner—she takes aim, and a bowstring thrills under her fingers—the air smells like blood, the air crackling with greasy smoke from the burning bodies on the roadside—

Her eyes fly open again.

"Why couldn't you stand up?" The words burst out of her before she can stop them, like air pushed from her lungs after a punch. Yato takes a sudden step back. He looks at her in alarm, but the tears gathering in her eyes reduce his face to an oval blur. Her voice comes out wet and rough.

"Why couldn't you fight him? You were about to die—!" Hiyori covers her burning face with her hands. The onion residue on her fingers mixes with her tears, making her eyes water more fiercely.

"Aren't you a _god?!"_ she wails.

The echo of her cry bounces around the kitchen, ringing in the silence.

After a moment, Hiyori pulls a deep breath from the bottom of her lungs, and lets it out in a long, shaky exhale. Her hands are still pressed over her face, water streaming down her cheeks from the onion she rubbed into her eyes.

She feels like a piece of paper balancing on its edge. Just one little push. Down she'll go.

After a full twenty seconds of the heavy, unforgiving quiet, Yato swallows. When he finally speaks, there's a strained edge to his voice, like he's fighting for every syllable.

"Why did you make that thing?" he asks.

Hiyori lowers her hands from her face. Her cheeks and nose are red and shiny, her eyes swollen like overripe fruit. Everything is a watery blur. Damn onions.

"What?" she asks thickly.

Yato points to the next room with his good hand. Hiyori turns her head, blinking savagely to clear the onion tears out of her eyes. His finger indicates the corner of the room, where her bed is pushed against the wall. Her eyes drop, and there it is.

The miniature shrine, that had somehow ended up half-under the cot. A corner of it still pokes out at her like an accusation.

"That," he says.

Instead of answering, Hiyori walks over to the shrine. Her feet land quietly on the smooth slats of the floor, striped with icy moonlight from the window. She leans down and tugs it from underneath the cot. Her fingers leave streaks through the dust on its slanted roof, and she runs one thumb over the name carved into it.

Behind her, she can hear Yato's labored grunts as he makes his unsteady way toward her. She turns to help him, but he's already at the foot of her bed, his eyes fastened on the shrine in her hands. Hiyori's eyes widen. Despite the critical injuries he had sustained, he bears little resemblance to the Yato she had half-carried through the door hours before. It's hard to see from just the moonlight, or even the lamplight filtering in from the kitchen—but it seems to her that his face already has more color, that the shadows beneath his eyes are less skeletal.

He seems to feel that her eyes are on him, though his own never leave the shrine in her hands.

"I'm feeling better," he explains, correctly interpreting her silent observation of him.

"That's good," Hiyori says. She sits down. Yato joins her in sitting, though he leaves nearly a foot of space between them as he perches near the end of her bed.

"I didn't have a good reason," she says at last. Her fingertips whisper over the imperfect, splintered face of the shrine, and her throat tightens at the lie. From the corner of her eye, she sees Yato's shoulders shift, very slightly angling his upper body toward her.

Hiyori starts speaking again, after a pause of a few moments to gather her thoughts.

"I think about that day a lot," she says. Her voice is soft, and steadier than she could have hoped.

"I've never really moved past it. It's haunted me. I feel the ghost of it hanging over my shoulder whenever I hear something outside at night, or when I'm walking alone. I've replayed a thousand versions of it in my thoughts, in my dreams, and I think…"

Hiyori swallows. Her throat has suddenly closed up. She takes a shuddering breath and continues: "I think I was supposed to die that day. Or if I didn't die, then something worse would have happened to me. But maybe…something was knocked out of balance when you arrived."

Her hands tighten, digging into the shrine, and she realizes she's not crying anymore, though it feels like she should be. Her fingers have gone numb.

"I was _supposed_ to die there," she says, feeling the truth of it in the weight the words lift from her chest. "And Nobu—whatever he is—it's like he's the curse that's been following me ever since then. Whenever he's close to me, I feel trapped. Paralyzed. Like I'm being dragged back into my worst memory—into that smoke. That was the most awful thing about him: he had this power to make me feel like I was still…like I was still _there._ Like every hour, every second I had lived beyond that was part of a future I had snatched from another Hiyori—and maybe the Hiyori that I was supposed to be is eternally existing in that hell."

Yato is no longer looking at the shrine. He looks at her face, at the blue shadows crawling across it as clouds pass over the moon. Her eyelashes tremble against her cheeks, her eyes fixed on the floor as she continues speaking in a low, steady voice.

"You saved me from that. You saved my life that day. I know it was you. You killed the people who were going to hurt me. You drove away Nobu. You brought me to my family. It was you, Yato. All the days I've been alive since then…I owe them to you. And that is why I made this."

She looks at him then, her hands shaking as she extends her arms, holding the shrine toward him. Yato reaches with his good arm to take it. For a moment he just holds the thing without looking at it. It's so fragile. His thumb finds a splinter, and he scrapes over it, digging the point of it into his thumb.

"It's not very much," she says. "I wish it looked nicer. I wish I could have convinced more people that you were real, even just a few. Then you might have had a real one now, a real shrine with all the rest."

Yato is motionless, holding the tiny shrine in one hand, his eyes fixed on some point just shy of her forehead. A muscle starts to tic in his jaw.

"I don't help people," he says finally. "That isn't what I do."

His voice is jagged. He doesn't look away from that invisible point. But, though his words are angry, his eyes are wide, almost fearful.

"Then what is it you do?" Hiyori asks. She feels herself breathing faster.

Yato looks at her then. There is no fear in his eyes. Only bright, mad blue. The kind that churns through Hiyori's chest and makes her stomach warm and fills her veins with fire.

"I kill things," he says.

The shrine in his hands begins to shake. An earthquake of tremors is passing through his body.

"I don't help people. I can't help people. I don't preserve. I destroy."

"You didn't destroy me."

She thinks that a better version of her would be brave enough to lessen the distance between them on the bed.

"I didn't…I didn't feel like destroying you," he says.

"Why not?"

"I don't know," he admits, and she believes him.

He is closer to her than before. She doesn't remember the moment he moves, but there he is. The side of his leg nearly brushes hers. Yato's eyes are holding her in some spell, completely different from Nobu's sick magic. They are more cold, more blue than heaven.

"Hiyori," he says. So close to him. The smell of him knocks her thoughts loose; there is the salt and blood of his injuries, the fresh linen of the bandage—something else, the godscent, like how the moon smells on the water—

"I wish you would tell me to leave."

He looks at her, waiting, eyes lowered to the space between their knees. Her heart sinks.

"Why?"

He swallows audibly. "I don't want you to feel indebted to me. I don't deserve all this."

By "all this," he can only mean the tiny shrine. Hiyori kneads her knuckles. She's going to go crazy from frustration, or confusion, or—

"You're unbearable!" she snaps, her voice loud and sharp in the quiet room. "I'm not settling a debt. I'm saying _thank you._ "

Yato leans back, his eyes wide, looking at her like she's an angry weasel. Even she hears the bite in her voice, but the angry rushing in her ears is much louder.

"Can't you just accept it as a gift?" she demands, her volume climbing. "You may have heard of it? It's something friends do for each other. There aren't any strings. This doesn't have to be about something that happened years ago, or about you being a god and me being a human. You've wanted one of these, right? So I made one for you. You're welcome."

She pulls herself up short, breathing heavily through her nose. Yato still leans away from her, shock covering his face.

"But it _is_ ," he says, mirroring a small measure of her annoyance in his tone. "This is _exactly_ about you being a human, and me being a god. You don't understand the weight of a gesture like this. You don't understand what this says, Hiyori."

Hiyori stares at him and her irritation evaporates. She looks deep into his face, through his eyes, and it doesn't really surprise her to find that behind them he is not a god, not a killer, not a tortured boy, but Yato. Just Yato.

"Yes," she says. "I do."

His nostrils flare. His mouth starts to crumple. Hiyori puts one hand on the shrine, and, avoiding his fingers, she pushes it toward him.

"I really do, Yato."

He looks at the little shrine, his face still screwed up, caught between a sob and a laugh. Another few seconds pass before he sucks a wet breath between his teeth, then sets the shrine next to his knee. Reluctantly. Reverently.

"You're the strangest human ever," he mumbles. Tears sparkle on his eyelashes. One starts to drip down his face, interrupted by the jag of a cut across his cheekbone.

Hiyori swallows a hard, hot lump in her throat. "Be quiet," she says weakly.

Then she lurches forward and kisses him.

Yato grunts as her weight puts pressure on his arm in the sling trapped between their bodies. Hiyori feels the hiss of his breath, the painful tightening in the muscles of his mouth. His lips are a hard line, and though she presses hers against them for another desperate moment, they don't soften.

She pulls back, resuming her seat on the bed. Her heartbeat is a raging river, pounding her breath against its harsh shores. Hiyori lowers her head, and for a while, neither of them say anything. She doesn't know if she wants to cry, or run away, or lie down on the floor and let her shame turn her to dust. The night air prickles against her hot, disturbed skin.

From the corner of her eye, Hiyori sees Yato pull his hand away from the shrine and raise his fingers to his lips. She can't bear to look at him directly. When his hand doesn't move away from his mouth, she turns her head to the side, only a little.

Yato stares into space, fingers pressed to his lips. It's like he's feeling the shape of his mouth for the first time. Because he isn't looking at her—and he doesn't seem to be offended or accusatory—Hiyori can raise her head again.

"I'm sorry," she mutters. Her voice is miserably small. "I shouldn't have—I'm sorry. That—that was…"

She trails off, digging her fingernails into her knees. She wants to crawl out of her skin. She isn't sorry at all. Hiyori knows that inside her, in the apex of her being, something has been screaming for this. Woken in her dreams, fed by her memories, stirred by his presence— _this is it_. This is the thing she wants.

Well. At least she tried.

She gives the smallest of sighs. Now she's going to get to her feet again, walk into the kitchen, forget she just kissed a god, and finish making that stupid rice.

Next to her, Yato draws a soft, trembling breath. His hand falls away from his lips. "I see," he says.

Hiyori is halfway to standing up when a hand takes firm hold of her elbow. Yato pulls her back, practically onto his lap, knocking a short, shocked gasp from her lungs. She stares wildly into his face—their noses nearly touching—and his eyes are only mirrors to her. Hiyori looks at herself rendered double: twice the anguish, twice the longing. He smells so beautiful it makes her want to cry.

Then he kisses her.

It isn't very good at first. Not with her sitting spear-straight, propped stiffly against him with his hand gripping her arm. Her eyes are glued wide open. It isn't real. The warmth of him, the sparks of response deep in her—it's too much for her mind to parse or process. He might as well be kissing a plank of wood.

Then his hand slides up her arm, moving with the curve of her shoulder and neck, and gooseflesh erupts down her arms. His thumb tilts her chin upward, settling his mouth more against hers.

This kiss makes her paltry effort look like a chicken peck.

It's a wonderful kiss, full and fragile and unpracticed. Her hands leave her lap—avoiding the sling—creeping up to explore the dip and hollow of his collarbones, to cup his cheeks, fingers catching in his tangled hair. Hiyori tastes salt on her lips from the tears rushing down his face. The tip of her nose presses into Yato's cheek; his skin is cool. The want inside her is overwhelming, oceanic: to hold him so close like this, to be something to him that no human or god has ever been before.

After some moments, his lips soften and he pulls away. Hiyori keeps her eyes shut, her mouth parted, hanging onto the last breath of the kiss. Then she opens her eyes again. His face is centimeters away, and he's studying her. She shifts, and realizes she's resting against his injured arm. The pain must be terrific. She tears her eyes away from her face, trying to adjust her weight so she doesn't hurt him, but he tightens his free arm around her.

She looks back at him, brows slightly furrowed.

"Your arm," she reminds him, her voice coming out in a humiliating, gravelly wheeze.

Yato ignores it. "The strangest human," he repeats. Hiyori's embarrassment abates a bit when his voice comes out even rougher than hers.

Her eyebrows gather together in a half-scowl. "Is that supposed to be a compliment?" she demands, looking down. The color rushes to her face when he chuckles, his breath trembling over her eyelids and cheeks.

"Not really," he replies, but his hand tightens around her, digging into her waist.

There's something burrowing in her mind: a long-held discomfort at the back of her consciousness. As glorious as it is kissing him, there's a piece that hasn't stopped bothering her. Hiyori leans away from him, keeping her eyes downcast as his gaze follows her.

"Sakura," she says. "Who is she?"

She can't keep the slight waver out of her voice. The smallest of shudders passes through Yato's body at the name. His hold on her waist loosens, and his breath catches.

"How did you hear about her?" he asks. There's a jagged hook of pain in the question, and she looks up at him again. She isn't prepared for the horror and regret written on his face.

"Hiiro," she says without hesitation. The raw grief in his eyes surprises the jealousy out of her.

Yato presses his lips together, and he lets out a long, trembling exhale. Hiyori isn't sure she wants to hear any more. The look in his eyes is terrible.

"Sakura was a friend," he says.

"Did you love her very much?" she asks.

Yato shuts his eyes and nods once. The knot in her throat is almost unbearable.

"I look like her," she whispers. "Hiiro said so. And…and Nobu, when he talked to me—it was like he thought I was someone else, for a few moments. Someone he used to know. Someone who looks like me."

Hiyori pulls away from Yato, putting her head in her hands. It's falling into place now. The thick, honey-sweet mockery she heard in Hiiro's voice. The wild, inhuman longing in Yato's face before he kissed her.

It isn't Hiyori he sees. Maybe it never has been.

Yato's voice punctures her misery like a cold needle.

"I killed her," he says, unprompted.

Hiyori jerks her head out of her hands, staring at him. His mouth is set in a stubborn line. They both wait for her reaction, and it surprises them both when it doesn't come. Hiyori's been dragged headlong through so many emotional extremes in the last two minutes alone that this admission feels almost anticlimactic.

"You killed her," she repeats carefully.

Yato nods again. "It's not something I like remembering," he admits. "But it was self defense. Mostly."

Hiyori's eyes are burning. She repeats her earlier question, only altered by one word.

"Who was she?"

So Yato tells her: the whole, sick, tragic story of the girl who befriended him, protected him, taught him. The girl who was killed because he was young and easily manipulated. The girl named Sakura, who died once. The girl named Tamanone, who died twice. When he finishes, he sits silently, shoulders slumped and head bowed.

Hiyori somehow manages to keep her lips closed around all of the apologies, condolences, and excuses that occur to her. It would be like trying to use a spoon to bail water out of a ship.

Several minutes of silence fill the space between them. Then Yato says:

"You do look like her."

The floor drops from under Hiyori.

"But not to me."

Her shoulders stiffen. Then she looks at him.

"You look like Hiyori," he says, and it rings genuine.

A smile rises to her lips. His mouth echoes it.

Hiyori notices for the first time that his eyes are gummy with sleep and salt. There's a trail of dried saliva down his chin. His hair is a nest of matted tangles. Bruises from the day before are rising to the surface, mottling his throat and blooming on his cheekbones. There's still a crust of blood around his left ear. He doesn't look particularly godly at all. And yet her heart careens against her ribs like a runaway stallion. She will never make sense of the way she feels about this boy. Never, ever, ever.

Smoke tickles her nose. Something is burning.

"The rice!" Hiyori leaps from the bed and races into the kitchen. The rice has thickened into a burnt, gray mass against the bottom of the pan. She scrapes the ruined blobs into a bowl and stares at it mournfully. After a few minutes of grunting and scraping, Yato gets himself to the door of the kitchen. He looks at the "rice," and a small laugh bursts from him. Hiyori shoots him a glare.

"Sorry," he says, schooling his face into false penitence.

"Weren't _you_ the one who was making a fuss over food?" she demands.

He tilts his head. "I don't remember making a fuss."

"But you did bother me into letting you help!"

"And I would have, if you had let me do something more interesting than sifting rice."

Hiyori marches up to him, planting both hands on her hips. "You have not earned that five yen. Give it back."

Yato smirks. "No."

"Then that's stealing."

A strange look crosses his face. He leans toward her, and there is the soft, quick press of his lips against hers. He pulls away, searching her face.

"Have I earned it now?"

Hiyori's lips are tingling. "No," she whispers.

He kisses her again, cupping her jaw with his good hand. Her lips part, and Yato catches her bottom lip between his teeth, sucking it. Her knees turn to water.

"And now?" he breathes against her cheek. Hiyori can't speak, so she just shakes her head.

Yato's eyes narrow. He moves his hand to the back of her neck, grips her hair, and damn near kisses the life out of her. Her whole world is the smell and taste of him. Her hands creep into his hair, burrowing in the soft tangles, holding him closer, closer. Her heart is galloping louder than she's ever heard it, and the noise of their breath is messy, greedy, as they steal oxygen from the scant inches between their bodies. When he pulls away, she almost cries.

"Now?" Yato asks, panting. His pupils are blown wide, reducing the blue around them to an icy ring. Hiyori nods weakly, half-collapsed against him. "Yes."

They stand there for another few moments while Hiyori tries to breathe normally. She takes a deep inhale, and the acrid sting of smoke singes her sinuses. Wrinkling her nose, she tries not to think about what her grandmother will say if she comes home to a kitchen turned black with smoke grime—

Hiyori's heart leaps into her throat. Then it drops straight into her stomach, sinking there like a rock. Sensing the sudden tension in her body, Yato holds her shoulder, looking into her face. As soon as he sees her expression, his half-lidded eyes fly wide open.

"What's wrong?" he demands.

"She's not back yet," Hiyori whispers. Her body is flooding with ice, freezing her in place. She can't move. She can't breathe.

"Who? Your grandmother?"

Hiyori barely hears him. A faint ringing erupts in her ears.

"I have to go."

She knows the voice that speaks is hers, but it sounds like a different person. Before Yato can pull her back, make her explain, she runs for the door. Hiyori throws it open, dashing into the street barefoot, her thin clothes whipping around her in the icy, pre-morning chill. Her heels encounter sharp rocks, but she runs onward, past the shrines that clatter with prayer plaques, past the ancient, yawning mouths of their gates. She runs out of the town, down the path with wagon ruts, onto the narrow footpath. Her stone-bitten feet are already numb with frost. Her lungs burn like they've been filled with salt water. She bursts into the clearing.

Her feet stutter to a halt.

There is a dark _something_ in the middle of the clearing: a black lake of shadow, dead ahead of her. Hiyori feels like the ground is tilting.

She walks forward, approaching the dark shape lying on the ground. Grandmother's face stares back at her.

Her eyes are blank, filmy like rotten fish. Her head rests on her stomach, and both hands lie folded on top of it reverently. Almost like she is praying.

Hiyori creeps closer. The thing in front of her and the grandmother she knows are not the same thing. They cannot be.

The neckline of Grandmother's clothes has been torn aside, showing the torn stump of her neck and the blotchy, gray skin beneath it. Into the flesh of her chest, someone has made cuts. The lacerations are deep, already swollen and rancid with moisture. Hiyori stares at them, her eyes refusing to acknowledge that the marks form words.

 **LITTLE SWEET**


End file.
